Steven Millhauser - The King in the Tree

Bed. Bookcase. No one’s stayed here in nearly a year. And yet, at one time, practically everyone stayed here: my mother, my father, Robert’s mother, Robert’s grandmother, for God sakes, his unmarried sister — let us please not forget Robert’s unmarried sister — the sort of woman who does you a little favor, like picking you up a quart of milk at the corner store, and says with a bright little laugh, “You owe me one,” meant to show her brave girlish humor in the face of life’s burdens — and Robert’s old roommate the failed painter, who backed me up against the refrigerator and instead of kissing me asked me the recipe for my ratatouille, and Robert’s old friend Lydia, who is so relieved to get away from Manhattan and so happy to be up here where you can actually see the stars at night. . and many more. . scads of colorful folks. . all of them right here, in this room. And sometimes I think of it as your room, if you know what I — in the sense that that would have been one solution. To the problem, I mean. Because you really were a problem, you know, a great big problem that didn’t seem to have a solution, or had only difficult solutions that themselves were problems without solutions. You could have died of cancer, for example — but you were too healthy for that — or I could have killed you that night — or Robert could have given you up. The poor man was suffering so. We talked a little, now and then. I would come down for my late breakfast, and Robert would materialize from somewhere or other and stand by the table, looking proud and sad and doomed.

“I need to know what you’re going to do.”

“Going to do?”

“About us.”

“Us, Robert?”

“Stop echoing me, will you? Just stop echoing me.”

And then he would disappear; it was very strange. Poof! Gone. A sad, angry ghost. And so in certain moods I would think: Oh, for heaven sakes. Come on, girl. Grow up. There’s no reason to be so childish about this. Why am I being so selfish? It’s all me me me. Why don’t I ever think of his needs? Then of course I would think that you might as well move into the house — into the guest room. If I loved Robert, then I wanted him to be happy, didn’t I? I saw myself tucking the two of you in at night, sitting on the side of the bed — oh, the adorable little rascals! — telling a bedtime story. And they allll lived hap pilyeverafter. Nighty-night! Don’t let the bedbugs bite! I would be a sister, a saint. And if any little problem came up between you two, why, I’d be right there, in the house. I could serve you meals. I could bathe you. Gosh, I could do your nails: red hot, or a nice minty green, or black as witches. I could even dress you in the mornings, after your strenuous nights. As I say, it was one solution. . to the problem. Look, the sun’s gone in. Or is it getting dark? I’m feeling a little tired. I’ll just sit for a minute on the side of the bed. If you don’t mind. You sit on that side. No, go right ahead. There was something I wanted to tell you. . You know: when I was lying at the foot of the stairs? Oh, now I remember.

In high school, senior year, I had a crush on a boy called Tom Conway. He was a good-looking, clean-cut sort of boy, not my type really, very shy, a little awkward, as if he’d grown into a body he didn’t know what to do with — all those arms and shoulders and elbows and things. I don’t know when I realized I had a crush on him. I liked being around him; it was like turning a corner and finding yourself on a street with shady maples and front porches. This wasn’t crazy teenage love, with wildfire burning in your stomach, but something else, something. . restful. Somehow we began taking walks together, that spring. We held hands. And that was it: no kissing, no hugging, no touching except for hands. We walked all over town, along tree-lined streets, with sun flickering on us through the leaves, up into the wooded section where the roads were curvy and there were no sidewalks and the big houses were set far back from the road. One day he took me to his house to meet his mother. She was a friendly woman, standing in the kitchen wearing an apron embroidered with apple branches. Right off the kitchen was a small room, with white curtains— a guest room, where his grandmother used to stay. Somehow we ended up lying on the bed in that room. We lay on our backs, on the green spread, holding hands. I remember it was late afternoon, and the sun coming through the windows had a very orange cast to it. Everything in the room was glowing in the orange light. I lay there entirely peaceful, entirely happy— I was without desire. Or let’s say the kind of desire I had for Tom Conway was completely satisfied by lying there on his grandmother’s bed, in the orange light, holding hands, while his mother moved around in the kitchen. That summer his family moved to Arizona. I never saw him again. I don’t know that I had time to miss him much, what with college starting and all the rest. But every once in a while, for no reason, when I’m walking along a familiar street, or coming up the back steps with a bag of groceries, or lying there at the foot of the stairs, I think of that room, with the white curtains, and the orange sunlight coming in.

You look tired. We’re almost done.

Our room. No, come in. I want you to come in. I said: Come in. You know, I admire that hesitation. It shows you have a certain. . decency. Or are you afraid of something? Good heavens! Nothing to be afraid of in here. Look: another bookcase. And permit me to introduce you to the, um, conjugal bed. Or have you two already met? Ha ha: my little joke. We used to read ourselves to sleep. . in the old days. We made love every night, just about. Maybe not every night, but a lot — we didn’t have to count. People count, you know. Twice a week. Once a decade. Then they look it up and compare themselves to the national average. That’s what I find so. . I mean, if we had grown distant or. . Of course sometimes we were tired, or not exactly in the mood. But then the next night. . or the night after. . And sometimes there were longer gaps, when we both, for no reason. . I mean, twenty-two years. It’s a long time. I’m going to lie down here, I’m feeling a little. . You lie down, too. I want you to. No, please: lie down. You’re tired, I can tell. We can have a nice pillow talk, like girlfriends in junior high. Of course I never had them, those nice pillow talks in junior high, but still. Oh, don’t you just adore that dreamy new math teacher? And Todd Andrews. He’s soooo cute. That’s how girlfriends talk, you know. At least I think they do. I used to imagine having talks like this with a girlfriend, but they weren’t about boys, those talks, they were about. . oh, books, and. . and things. Take my hand. All right, then I’ll take yours. Sisters! We’ve been through a lot together, we two. Listen. This is where I was lying when the call came about Robert’s accident. That was in January. He’d been very upset, you know. We’d had an argument, a week earlier. Oh, a bad one. Do you know what we were arguing about? We were arguing about making the bed. Isn’t that the strangest thing? The man on the phone kept saying something about black ice. The words seemed weird and scary, as if he were talking about some disease. The Black Ice Plague. Black ice in your carotid artery. Sharp splinters of black ice piercing the left ventricle. Robert was what? Was dead? He was angry, for God sakes, how can you die when you’re. .? Killed by black ice. The black ice of his black-hearted icy wife.

Isn’t it fun talking like this, just the two of us? Here’s a secret. Don’t tell anybody. When Robert and I fell in love, when I was twenty-four and he was thirty, it was all very passionate and so forth, but for a while there. . he couldn’t make love to me. It drove him wild. He swore that never, never before. . He was ready to kill himself. But you know something? I didn’t care. I was so in love with him that even if. . It came right, soon enough. He was so grateful to me, as if I’d endured the impossible — fought some heroic battle. He swore I was an angel, a goddess. How I hated that. What he couldn’t understand is that I was so happy that I didn’t care about. . about anything on earth. I was demented with happiness. They should’ve carted me off to the loony bin. And then, when we started making love, I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but it became absorbed into the happiness I was already feeling.