CYTHERA: Mount Penglai is lovely. The mangoes are amazing.
ERASMO: You’ll let me take him, won’t you? [Cythera says nothing.] He’s worth nothing to you. He’s just a kid. He’s going to be bent into all kinds of unpleasant shapes by this. He needs a father. Or at least someone who can un-pretzel him from time to time. Trust me, you don’t want him. I do. Let me give him a childhood.
CYTHERA: We’ll consider it. May I…may I ask? You wear a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Indulge my curiosity?
ERASMO: She didn’t want to get married. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t her husband.
CYTHERA: [pause] Can I get you a last coffee before you go?
Christmas Card,
mailed to C. Brass c/o Oxblood Films,
Yemaya, December 1952
To be included in the manuscript of Erasmo St. John’s memoir, The Sound of a Voice That Is Still, scheduled for publication Spring 1959 (Random House)
Front:
SNOW HO HO!
HAPPY CHRISTMAS
FROM MERRY MARS!
Inside:
Hiya, Cyth,
Well, he’s gone to seek his fortune, and I’m drinking alone at Yuletide with no one else to write to.
I don’t know if he ever loved me, and I don’t know what the thing in his hand means. It never gave him any pain that I could tell. I don’t know if it ever changed much; he started wearing gloves when we were living in New York (what a cock-up that was! Six months of yelling at each other in brownstones neither of us will be able to fish out of the back drawer again) and never took them off. Wouldn’t show me the hand any more than a boy shows himself naked to his father past a certain age.
Not that I was his father. I wanted to be. I did. It would have been…well, there’s no point in dressing it up. It would have been like Rin and me had a kid together. That’s not fair, it’s not a fair thing to put on a traumatized little boy, but we all put something too heavy on our babies.
It moved in his sleep. I remember that, in the days before the gloves. It moved in his sleep like it was underwater. Like it was drifting in a current, a tide that you couldn’t see. I touched it once. He was sick, really sick—he was sick a lot back then. Nowhere sat right with him ’til Mars. He reached out to me in his fever, and he did that seldom enough. I held him tight and took his hands and I could feel it, moving against my palm, like it was looking for something. Maybe purchase, maybe a way out, maybe it couldn’t breathe with my palm against it. But its little tendrils touched my skin and that is the only time I have heard Severin Unck’s voice since the Clamshell made moonfall. I never told him. How do you tell a kid that?
Cristabel got her Russian citizenship six or seven years ago and came out to our little red planet. I bet you saw that coming, didn’t you? She can play the bassoon. I didn’t really think anyone played the bassoon anymore. It’s an instrument out of books and poems and grandads manning the watch on the prow of lonely, starlit ships. It sounds plaintive and kind in the desert dark.
The plain fact is, after everything that happened in Adonis, I could never love anyone who wasn’t there.
I might try to write a book. We’ll see. I’m not much of a writer. Anything more than a title card seems wasteful to me. I spent the best years of my life under the law of silent flicks: Show everything, because you can’t say much. But I think I might give it a go.
It’s almost dark in Mount Penglai. The way my house sits, I can watch the kangaroos out on the red plains. Who knew those funny creatures would take to Mars so well?
The Ingénue’s Handbook
12 October 1947, Eleven in the Evening
Pellam’s Parlour, Grasshopper City
My darling Severin,
You must know I always meant to tell you everything. You deserved to know. It was only that I couldn’t be certain, not absolutely certain, and without certainty, why rock the boat?
Oh, what a dreadful thing to say! I sound like my grandmother, and she had a full set of dentures by forty-five. And it’s execrable wordplay as well. You always gave me a slap on the wrist for punning in your presence. But I know you liked it, you dissembler, you.
I’ve settled on Miranda, of all places. It’s beautiful here, really. Nothing like my old movie. Thaddeus shot Europa-for-Miranda for the tax shelter and it still looks spectacular, but it’s nothing like the gentle blue hills and snowy roofs and bright red flowers no bigger than a prick of blood all over the place.
I have a horse now! She’s not really a horse. Horses on Miranda are the exact colour of absinthe with white hair and rather lion-like paws. Mine’s called Clementine. I thought about naming her Severin, I really did, but it’s an even more unwieldy name for a horse than it was for a little girl, even if the horse does have green lion feet. I bought her from a Mirandese lady I wish you could meet. She comes round quite a bit to help me look after Clementine, and lately she’s been staying longer and longer. My Miranda affair. It’s funny, but she looks just like Larissa Clough in The Man Who Toppled Triton. Do you remember that one? Mortimer gets called to the back of beyond to investigate an assassination, or what have you. They’re all starting to run together.
I miss you terribly. I’ve missed you on and off for half my life. A stepmother’s burden, I suppose. I do hope I wasn’t too wicked. Oh, Sevvy, my lass, there are nights out here when the sky is so full of moons you think they’ll come tumbling down over the grass and roll right through your door, and all I want in the world is to show you around my little house, make you a cup of tea, and ask you, My dearest of hearts, how have you been, really? And you would tell me about your next movie, and Erasmo, and how old-fashioned my silly watercolours are, and who paints their parlour chartreuse, anyway? I’d make you sandwiches just like the Savoy’s. You could toss Clementine a raw rump roast; she likes them especially.
And then I remember, and it’s too dreadful for words.
I always meant to tell you. I’m still not certain, but I’m…certain enough.
Sevvy, your father didn’t shoot anyone. I thought he did; everyone thought he did, though no one would say it. Batty, horrid, bear-brained Freddy Edison shot my Thaddeus, and Percy kept him from spilling it all like a bucket of paint and ruining himself because…well, God knows why Percy ever loved Freddy the way he did. A more undeserving shit of a man was never born. Freddy did it because he thought his wife, Penny, was sleeping with Thad. It wasn’t even in the neighbourhood of true, of course. I knew that, but I couldn’t say how I knew, and I couldn’t understand why Percy was spitting lies whenever he spoke, so I…I ran away. I know I ought to have been braver. But I’ve come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime, and if you spend it too soon, you’re all out of fuck it all to hell by the time you really need it.
I knew Thad never touched Penny. Thad never touched anyone of the lady persuasion. When I was twenty or twenty-one, I came to his house to get a few scripts. I came a little early or a little late, I can’t remember which, though I do remember how bright Thaddy’s forsythia bloomed that year. It framed his door in pure gold. I walked right in because I am a rude and graceless creature and saw him kissing Laszlo Barque goodbye. They looked so lovely together, like summer in two people. We all froze like antelope who’ve smelled a hyena. I saw them decide to trust me, and they saw me promise to keep their secret, all without saying a word. We had a splendid afternoon playing gin rummy and complaining, my favourite hobbies.