Struck but broadly satisfied, Marius turned on to his side.
Time passed.
"He cried," said Marco, and nodded suddenly in the dark.
Marius was asleep. The words stayed in the air. Marco listened to them.
That morning with Anstice-oh, man-that morning when he woke up in Anstice's arms, or at her side, or in her bed, which was a small bed, he lay on his back and stared at the world of adultery. The ceiling was a
good enough figure for it, the way the stains massed and groped around
its edges (the pale orange of trapped water, of rot), moving stealthily in on the center, where the cropped lightcord hung. Plasterwork saturated in solitude enclosed him, on every side. He felt fear, and grief; he longedMarco seemed to know how you did it. Only as he left the room did he turn his head to look at his mother, his brother. His bare legs seemed to move rather faster than usual, too, not with purpose but as if he was being steadily pushed, or urged on, from behind.
I was once lying on a low bed in a room to which a child had been summoned-in which a small boy would be denounced and arraigned. So, I was on the same level as he was, down there, three feet from the ground. I have denounced children myself and seen the head of hair, both thick and fine, inclined in contrition. But when you're on their level you see that really they're staring sadly straight ahead, lifting their eyes only in dutiful reflex to confront the cathartic fire of the parent's wrath. The accusation is stated, the confession secured, the sentence imposed. Looking straight ahead, the child's teeth-milk teeth, perhaps, or hig-gledypiggledy, newfangled, as the big supplants the small-are bared in an undesigning sneer of misery. Children have usually done something. What had Marco done?
"Two days ago," Richard began, "the day before yesterday you said- you said something very hurtful to me. Marco?"
Marco looked up.
"And I want to know what you meant by it."
Richard was standing behind his desk. He raised his chin, and Marco could see the blotches and stipples of his throat, the misadventures with the razor, the mobile growth of the Adam's apple, the slanting sheen of his damaged eye.
"It was the most hurtful thing you've ever said to me. Ever."
Marco's ears now heard the quiet roar of shame and turpitude. He looked up, once, and then went on staring sadly straight ahead. The room was crepuscular anyway, but darker for the child, whose world was folding slowly inwards.
"You said," said Richard, inhaling, "that I was smelly."
Marco looked up, in hope. "I didn't," he said. For Daddy, in his view, ?wasn't smelly. Tobacco, seldom-laundered clothes, a certain mysterious difficulty of the body: but not smelly. "I didn't, Daddy."
"Oh but you did, Marco. Oh, you did. You said I smelled"-and here he raised his chin again, and the larynx squirmed-"of poo."
"I didn't."
" 'I dunnop who,' " Richard quoted. " 'Ooh you smelly thing.' "
". .. It was a. joke. It was a joke, Daddy." Marco didn't appeal to the word so much as throw himself at its feet. "It was a joke."
Richard waited. Then he said, "Do I or do I not? Smell of poo.?
again, fully mistaken the attempt for the deed. Could this be seen as an improvement-another way (better, gentler), for the years of one's maturity? Gina knew the difference between the word and the deed. And, yes, it would certainly be more relaxing if she didn't. Probably, toward the end of life, universally, there wasn't any difference.
And there wasn't any difference when it came to guilt, and culpability. If Gina found out about this, he knew what she'd do (she had warned him often enough): Gina would retaliate, in kind. Richard turned his head. On Anstice's bedside chair there was a stack of the novels she got through at a rate of two or three a day. Prewar, clothbound. Romantic, serious: written by women. Their names-all the Susans and Henriettas-never recurred. It was amateur fiction, for a vanished reading public. One novel each: the novel that everybody was supposed to have in them.
Now Anstice said, "Thank you, my darling. You've made me ready to die. Right," she added, with a responsible frown. "What's the best way to tell Gina?"
Richard sometimes tried to anthropomorphize the sun and the planets- or to solar-systematize his immediate circle. He never got very far with it.
Gina was the Earth: Mother Earth.
Venus was both Morning Star and Evening Star. The Evening Star was perhaps Belladonna. The Morning Star was Demi.
Halley's Comet you could pin on Anstice, except she made her loop at least once a day instead of once a lifetime, an apparition of soot and ice with her comet trail of madlady hair.
Was Gwyn Jupiter, the nearly star, too small to ignite in nuclear burning, or was he already the Sun?
Was Steve Cousins Mars, the planet of war, or was he simply Mercury, the messenger, bringing you information from the other side?
Try as he might, Richard could never find anything good for the boys to be. When they fought, as they often did, then the Martian satellites of Deimos and Phobos suited them fine: Fear and Dread. More usually, though, when they were being cooperative, or at least silent, and elsewhere, then they were just spots of light-the Heavenly Twins.
He knew who he was. He was Pluto; and Charon was his art.
Gina was Mother Earth. Bipolar, sublunar, circumsolar.for the status quo ante. Oh, the way things were … Richard had but one straw to clutch at-one crumb of comfort: his utter sexual failure the night before. That fiasco: how he would cling to it. Just wait until he got into the pub and told all the lads … Suddenly Anstice rose from the bed. Almost as suddenly as Gina did-when Marco cried. Adulterers sometimes leave beds suddenly. But nobody leaves a bed as suddenly as a mother. Richard closed his eyes. He could hear the knout of Anstice's ponytail as she crossed the room. When she returned she had a mug of tea for him, the mug murky and stippled like Cotswold stone, its crevices coated and recoated with the residue of a million lone mugfuls. One day this residue would reach to the brim, and the mug would be dead, solid with its own deposits, and Anstice would at last be ready.
Her tone, and choice of words, surprised him when she said, "You were a naughty boy last night."
"… What kind of a naughty boy?"
She was gazing at him in comfortable reproach. "Were you careful?"
"Oh yes," twinkled Richard, ever the gentleman, even when being a naughty boy.
"I love you," she said.
He felt the temptation to collapse into all this-to collapse into the vastness of his error. Her head dropped as it sought his chest. And there, tickling his nostrils, was her fierce thatch of ear-whisker and rogue eyebrow. Richard was moved, in his way. He stroked her neck; beneath the coarse dressing-gown his fingers found the shoulder strap of something softer and more slippery. He looked. It was pink. Richard understood rejection slips; he understood neglect; he understood people who had nobody to keep themselves clean for. And here was Anstice: in her rejection slip. In his hand he weighed the base of her ponytail, like the joint of a sinewy limb. Anstice's syrup, atop the pink slip. For a shampoo you would go to the carwash with such a head of hair. He closed his eyes and saw a dog in a bathtub, worriedly shivering, its body mass apparently halved by the hug of the wet coat.
And Richard was moved, in his way. He was so moved that he tried to be a naughty boy again. But that didn't work out either. He tried everything he knew that might delight a woman. He tried forcing it in with his thumb. He tried bending it double. But bending "what double? Nor was he remiss in the matter of gasping and coughing in her ear. Ten minutes of this and then he slid away and flopped on to his back. And Anstice whispered, "Everything they said about it is true."