“I don’t need any of that, Janey — don’t want that. It’s not that I don’t find you a stunner, all right? That, you most certainly are! It’s just — well, you’ve been with him, haven’t you? With Rossetti. And I understand it. I know I drove you to it. But you see I don’t know much anymore. Don’t know much about myself. And I don’t know you … and you, well, you don’t know me, now do you? What I’m up to. You’re not as keen on my work as you once were, no? Anyhow”—he stroked his stubble, mulling a mathematical problem—“it’s a while since I’ve been with a woman — why, I’d hardly know what to do! It’s a while since I’ve been with myself! And we don’t need do it, Janey. We don’t need do it for me to look after ya, we won’t have any of that — not for me to look after you. Is that all right? That’s all right, isn’t it, Janey?”
While he spoke, Ms. Scull went from puzzlement to tender acquiescence, until finally answering “ess! ess!”—a thousand times ess. For while she could hear little, she understood all.
From that moment on, she became exceedingly careful of her person; carried herself differently when she walked, with and without him; and modulated her outbursts, which themselves became more studiedly articulate. The corrective afflatus was not the result of “falling in love,” for Jane Scull felt she had always loved this man, but rather a kind of self-reckoning that came upon her as would a religious vision — a sudden, inexplicable, karmic settling of accounts, a cosmic ordering and coming-to, a gyroscopic awareness that arrived with such ease and graceful surety that it would remain the rest of her days.
That night in the defunct Tropicana, they stayed up late and Will’m sang old Oxford songs. Then he lay on his back while she slept, attentive to her respirations. At half-past three, like that time at the Higgins, there were crashes and shouts and flashes of light as policemen raided the units. Will’m took her hand and ran as he’d run so often through the years — this time into the night, past the quiet pier and Camera Obscura, north along refurbished bluffs to the palisades of the California Incline.
They leapt a low wooden fence and spent the night huddled against each other on the cliffside brush of the esplanade, where, hours before, couples had lingered to watch the raked evensong of sunset skies.
Will’m was fated to meet all manner of eleemosynary souls — he brought that out. A few weeks ago, he had caught the eye of a Catholic outreach worker giving away condoms and toothbrushes on the Promenade. Now, seeing the bedraggled couple the morning after their eviction, the benefactor approached.
“Do y’all need help?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Do y’all need a place to stay?”
Will’m shifted, stroking his cheek where once the beard had been.
Jane Scull took the man in with benign, near stately indifference — proud new wife of the Chairman of the Disembodied.
“It is possible,” said Will’m, with guarded eyes.
“Y’all know SeaShelter? Over on Olympic? Salvation Army? Sure you do. Over by the buses — y’all seen the big yard with the Blue Buses?”
The voice loved to rise up, whether asking or telling.
“And what,” said Will’m, “is there, sir?”
“Well, showers and beds and lockers — y’all been to St. Joseph’s, haven’t you?” He looked at Jane Scull and squinted. “SeaShelter’ll get you a hot shower? And there’s food and lockers for your personal things?”
Her eyes lit up at the mention of amenities — yet it was the idea of a locker that for Will’m was a real enticement. He would be able to retrieve his manuscript and stow it close at hand.
“I can help y’all be guests if you want to be. Y’all can stay for twenty days. They can help with medical needs, too. Would y’all be interested in being guests?”
“Possibly yes, sir.” He didn’t want to be a pushover, or a charity case either. But he had Janey to think of now.
“Real good then! They’ll find you a job? Lotta hotels in this city now — new hotels. There’s one thing you should know? They’re drug- and alcohol-free? I mean, SeaShelter? That’s something they don’t tolerate. So they expect you to be sober?” He handed them a flyer with a map to the facility and a general list of rules and requirements. “Go stand at the gate between three and six, that’s when guests are let in. Three and six in the evening. Best get there early? Now, one more thing is, they ask you to leave by seven-thirty each morning? Because they don’t want you sleeping in? Y’all like me to go on and call ahead to say you’re coming?”
The couple agreed. After the minister left, Jane threw her arms around Will’m and said, “Shower!” without impediment.
CHAPTER 30. To the Four Winds
SeaShelter is a small, clean hangar on Olympic, in the crook of the Santa Monica Freeway as it loops into PCH. Showers and lockers reside outdoors, while the structure itself contains kitchen, administrative offices and beds segregated by sex. Morning coffee and biscuits are provided, and supper too. At twenty days, guests are asked to decide whether they wish to stay on as bona-fide residents in a six-month social re-entry program. Jane and William elected to do so, becoming sterling citizens in short stead.
William was sent to a clinic for pills, the daily cluster of which had a sly way of distancing the voices of Victorian friends and family. The medications’ main side effect was obesity — he now tipped the scales at three hundred pounds. Jane Scull ate less than before admission but did not lose any flesh. She was fitted with new hearing aids, and waxed indispensable with pail and mop; whereas William Marcus — for that is how he came to be known — having offered his services impromptu during a mundane culinary emergency, was drafted thereafter into the role of kitchener and off-hours pâtissier.
At the same time they thickened body and senses, swallowed prescriptions made for small miracles too: soon, the face of a wife appeared before him that was neither of the Janes — it was Katrina’s, come not as hallucination but as odd curio, to evoke sorrow and tender sympathies. While waking or rising or even strolling with Ms. Scull, the exagent formed memories of himself in restaurants and exquisite cars with boisterous, passionate men. He was able to recall premieres and brises and corporate retreats, and saw the landscape of Oxford — less the colleges of his communion with Swinburne and Ruskin, though he did see the stones of Avebury and his own bare, bleeding feet; more, Katrina with him at hospital … but perhaps at a later time than during those English peregrinations. Adirondacks? He turned the queer word over in his mouth like a taste he was trying to identify. He’d spent lots of time in hospitals, it seemed. After a while, William even visualized the cul-de-sac at Redlands, but could not remember the name of that place or the faces of the couple who nurtured him there.
Meanwhile, Jane Scull walks the Promenade when SeaShelter chores are done. She is alone, and that’s how she wants it, for she is unwell in body, mind and spirit. There are things she cannot discuss with anyone — not William or the shelter folk or even the street pastor, who still visits to wish them well, the tail of each utterance lilting skyward like a smoky question mark.
What would the Catholic have told her that she didn’t already know? He might have reiterated the sublime workings of the Lord … but she knew His lessons and workings, though in all humility could not understand why He would wish her to be so miserable after bestowing her dear William — for the Lord had brought him to her, and William was her life. It was for him that she diligently stood before the looking glass with a self-tutored apostrophe of plosives, affricates, surds and sonances; it was for him she now bathed; it was for him she now breathed; it was for him she spoke glottal poems that, because of her shyness, he would never hear, a phonemic rhapsody of diphthongs, yaps and rhotacisms, blubbers and brays, thunders of ictus and rictus and hail of caesuras — electric elocutions, all for him and for hymn and for Him. For William …