With that Gwen drains her glass of its wine and eyes me expectantly. But, I ask, is there anything objectively wrong? Are you being hounded by landlords, drug lords, have you done something unspeakable, is there something appalling, so awful that you’re not able to break it to me? I guffaw nervously, so that neither of us has to take the question seriously. She chuckles merrily, then again looks glum, her lips turning down to that fateful position, the grimace, which is her natural pose, her normal expression in repose. This guise of normality quiets me, and I feel at ease. I refill her glass and mine.
We look at the harbor. The moon is resolute and unshaken above the horizon line. The night is eerily peaceful, and for a long while we hear only the slap of the waves against the wharf and the strains of bouzoúki music in the distance, probably emanating from the sole disco in town — one of the young Greeks had opened it, though bouzoúiki music wouldn’t have come from there. I don’t know where the sounds are from.
Lu-lu, Gwen pronounces grandly, even portentously, letting the two syllables linger, nearly languish, on her tongue, Lu-lu, of course someone’s after me, someone’s after you too — Mr. Death, and he’s carrying a big scythe, swinging it in huge strokes across the landscape, he’s wearing a gray gown — I adore gray — and he’s marching across Atlanta, the city’s on fire, like Watts, or he’s coming in from the wheat fields. Save me, it’s a Grant Wood painting. It’s titled: Death doesn’t take it on the chin. Death isn’t on the lam, or death goes out on a limb, death’s limber and portable…
Stop, stop. All right, all right, I command, laughing. I exhort her that, yes, death is certainly marching nearer, but to me, not to her. You are still a child, I tell her, just one of your tots, an amazing, adult child. To me, you always will be. And in the natural course of things I will pass on to my reward before you, and you will dance at my funeral. I want you to, I implore her, in addition I want you to wail. That is my plea. It will even be in my will! Then I take Gwen’s hand in mine and hold it tight.
Gwen’s hand was like ice in my own. I will never forget that moment or that sensation, her small, icy hand in my hot puffy one. As the moon, implacable in its unearthly place and as perfect as an illustration in a fairy-tale book, shone down, Gwen made light of death with more of that invocatory talk of death’s riding in from a fiery Atlanta, but I think this time she improvised upon another theme — Mr. Death was traveling Greyhound and absolutely everyone on the bus wanted to die.
It was my belief that that night Gwen and I invoked — no, provoked — death, woke him up, that we stirred that specter of mortality. He had been sleeping quietly above our heads. Death needn’t take the shape or form, or need the time, one thinks it will. Gwen taught me that. For instance, she had often insisted that it was an act of hubris on man’s part to have created perspective, to have placed the eye, and by dint of that to have placed human beings, in the center of a series of lines and planes, in the center of being. I remember well that Gwen scowled exaggeratedly at my use of the words natural and human nature. She mocked the idea of the natural order, which she did, and had done, over the years in conversation with me.
Pointing to the stars ironically, Gwen contended — no, contested — with the sky and with me yet again. The so-called natural world existed only as a reproof, only to taunt us human beings, to tease us, for weren’t we the ones to conceive of Nature to begin with? Hadn’t we invented it? Innate is inane, don’t you think so, Lulu?
Then, under the imperturbable sky, Gwen metamorphosed. She became stunningly solemn. She whispered into my ear, as if there were someone else sitting at our table, someone who ought not hear her confidences, that it was not so long ago when she had realized that she had been waiting, but she had not known that, waiting for someone or something, and now that seemed ridiculous. Life did not have meaning or purpose, she knew, but perhaps it required an investment, an act of faith. But she had so little — and here she grimaced — of that tender capital. Gwen claimed it was too late for that, for her. I denied it. I told her she had all the time in the world.
All the time in the world, I pontificated. What things I pronounced and with what surety! As much as I didn’t hear Gwen, I didn’t hear myself. But I am racing ahead now. When logic is no longer a comfort, it’s hard to keep orderly the sequence of events. But I suppose she did know then what she faced, what had to be done or confronted, and had come to visit me in order to tell me, but she didn’t, not then, and instead, perhaps, Gwen involved herself with John and Alicia, in some grotesquerie calibrated to stymie the ugly and the ineluctable. She referred to it, their affair, as a grotesquerie, and I suppose it was — one meant, I assumed, to frighten away malign spirits. Which ones precisely, I hadn’t a clue. Whatever clues Gwen dropped for me were laid much too subtly and well, or, as she might put it, were dropped down too deep a well!
Chapter 14
I dreamed last night I knew precisely how to finish Household Gods. I was at the fourth and last part, which meant that the book was in that many parts. Its design, the whole, had been revealed to me. But I could not actually see what had been revealed, for the writing was faded or always, somehow, illegible. I was continually frustrated. Because travel was involved — I was moving from place to place — the dream seemed to imply that I had to find something or someone, Helen, I presume, before I could finish my book. It was most assuredly the strangest dream I’ve ever had. There was something about death in it, my mother’s death, I think, but it may have been my own. While I accept the Greek version of destiny, or fate, as in tragedy, when one’s end flows from one’s flaws, from hubris, I abhor the idea that one’s life is fated. Fate in its Californian manifestation — horoscopes and astrology — is anathema to me. So it struck me as bizarre that my dreamworld was invaded by something like a fate. But then I was engrossed in the Gypsy book. And doesn’t Freud say, if I remember correctly, that dreams are concoctions, condensations, of what happened during the day.
With Gwen, the evening and its events dangled delicately from a string, twisting this way and that. There was no plan, no plot, and one seemed not to have any intentions at all. Time always behaves like that with Gwen; it is stretched and fuller than with others, with whom time is less substantial, less rich. Time is more intense in Crete. It is unfortunate that we were interrupted — first, and rather rudely, by Roger. Then by others.