Loon Lake Read online

  in castles above the road unemployed warriors duel the firelight.

  They weep they curse they raise wine cups to honor. Saints

  of the wrong religion go unrecognized in the darkness beyond the

  lighted windows of the inns. And at the end of the Tokaido

  at the top of an inaccessible mountain sits the emperor himself,

  a self-imperator, a self impersonating a self in splendor

  in his empty room its walls painted with long-legged waterbirds,

  its floor covered with ministers lying face down attending him.

  The emperor is lacquered, his sword is set with suns, while

  in another room doctors dispute the meaning of his stool.

  Oh compact foreign devils flesh of rice

  Everywhere we are smaller than the landscape.

  I sit on the wood promenade overlooking my garden and I

  am the real emperor. The small twisted tree is very old and has a

  name. The rocks like islands in the sea of raked

  gravel have names. The gravel waves break upon the rocks.

  wall. I run across the gravel sea

  and spy on her through the gate. Her blue-black hair is

  undressed, like a child’s. She sits on a bed of moss, her

  bowed neck as long as a lady’s of the court. The words rise

  and fall in my throat growling and humming and making tunes.

  I am breaking the laws of my religion. She is alert now to

  the aviary of our language and stares at me with her wet mournful

  eyes, the track of one tear surmounting the pout of her lip

  and disappearing in the corner of her mouth. I speak and she

  shifts to her knees, deferentially places her hands flat upon

  her thighs. The soles of her feet are pale. She listens.

  She is as still as the fieldmouse in the talons of the hawk.

  Oh the fifty-three stages of the Tokaido. The old monk and the girl

  clamber up on the rock path. Along the path falls a stream

  so vertically on rocks that the water, broken into millions of

  drops, bounces pachinko pachinko like pellets of steel.

  We find a ledge overlooking the ocean. I aspire to goodness.

  I aspire to the endless serenity of the realized Buddha.

  In the sun on the rock ledge I remove her clothing. I

  remove my clothing she averts her eyes. We hunker in the

  hairless sallow integument of our kind. Her haunches are

  small and muscular. Her thighs are slender. Her backbone

  is as ordered as the stones of a Zen garden. I see reflected

  in the polished gray rock under her the entrance to her life.

  It is like the etching of a fig.

  Raising my hand in the gesture of tenderness, I see her chin

  lift in trust and at that moment I fling myself at her

  and she falls into the sea.

  She falls in a slow spiral, wobbling like a spent arrow.

  I feel her heart beating in my chest.

  I feel all she is, her flesh and bone, her terror in the sky.

  The field of his accomplishment was his own private being, the grandness and depth of his failed affections. Each of his representations of himself at the critical moments of this past contributed to the finished man before me. He proved everything by his self-deprecation, his sighs, his lachrymose pauses, his prodigious thirst for wine, and he proved it in the scene or two with Clara, when, at an hour he somehow always knew, he would get me to help him over to her cottage not five minutes since she had come in herself, her make-up and hair and dress all showing the use of the evening, and she in some sort of sodden rage. What excited Mr. Penfield was the idea of rescue. He wanted to save her, take her away, carry her off. It was the pulsating center of his passion. And she seemed now not to understand, as if they spoke different languages, hers being Realism.

  “War-rin,” she would say, “do I have to spell it out?”

  “Oh God,” he’d cry, lifting his eyes, “oh God who made this girl, give her to me this time to hold, let me sink into the complacencies of fulfilled love, let us lose our memories together and let me die from the ordinary insubstantial results of having lived!”

  “Goddamnit,” Clara shouted, and then, appealing to me, the audience, a role I embraced as I would any she chose, “what does he want from me? Oh Jesus! Joe,” she’d say when, invariably, he broke down, “why did you bring him? Take him home. Get this fucking drunk out of here.”

  Another night or the one after, I went over to her cottage alone. I supposed it was midnight. No light on. It didn’t matter. I sat in the shadow of her porch and I folded my arms and waited. A strong wind blowing over the mountains and sounding in the trees around the cottage. The trunks of the pine trees swayed and creaked. I sat with my back to the door and drew up my knees. I might be hearing her in her rut, singing somewhere with the wind going past an open window. That was all right. That was all right. If the poet could have her on her terms and the rich man on his, I could have her on mine. My revelation. Maybe she traveled like a princess on a private train, maybe poets thought they recognized her, but I knew her accent, she was an Eastern industrial child, she had come off streets like my streets she was born of the infinite class of nameless workers my very own exclusive class. Jesus, I had pressed against girls like her in the hallways, I had bent them backward on the banister, I had pulled their hair I had lifted their skirts I had rubbed them till they creamed through their underpants.

  I reached over my head and tried the doorknob. Open. I decided to wait low ceiling. The hearth was cold. I put in some paper and kindling and got a fire going and stood with my back to the fire.

  The green livery had as little regard for her as they did for Penfield. The place was a mess. I saw traces of our first party. Dirty dishes in the little alcove kitchen. Not that she’d care. I looked in her bedroom. Her clothes everywhere, stockings twisted and curled like strips of bacon, step-ins in two perfect circles on the floor as if disengaged in a meditative moment, or flung across a lampshade as if drop-kicked.

  Poor Mr. Penfield. I knew what he couldn’t possibly know. I knew what made his sympathies obsolete. Clara and Bennett had had breakfast together on the morning after he arrived. I managed to be raking leaves at the foot of the terrace wall under their line of sight. It was a bright windy morning and the clouds actually were below us over the lake and drifting through the trees on the mountains. “I think clouds should stay in the sky where they belong,” Clara said, “don’t you?” And Bennett had laughed.

  Clara held a relentless view of the world. There were no visible principles. Every one of her moods and feelings was intense and true to itself—if not to the one before or the one after. She lightened and darkened like the times of the day.

  I smoked a cigarette from the monogrammed cigarette box. Clearly, in my aspiration it was FWB I would have to contend with. FWB, the man who was paying for everything. Conceivably this gave him an advantage.

  I mashed out the cigarette, stretched out on my back before the fire, put my hands under my head and closed my eyes.

  I slept in that position for several hours. I remember coming awake with the fire out and sunlight glowing on the windows. The silhouettes of branches and leaves wavered on the log wall and a reddish gold light filled the room. I heard the sound of an airplane. It grew louder and then with a rise in pitch it receded and grew faint. I lay there and it got louder again and finally so close and thunderous that the cups rattled in the sink. Then the sound receded once more, the pitch of the engine rising. I went to the window: a single-engine plane with pontoons was banking over the mountain on the other side of the lake. I watched it, a seaplane with a cowled engine and an overhead wing. As it banked, its dimensions flared and I saw a smartly painted green-and-white craft zooming over the water and then lifting its nose and banking off again, the sun flashing on its
wings. It was very beautiful to see. Again it was coming around. I ran outside. I watched several runs, each one was different in speed or angle of descent, it looked as if the pilot was practicing or doing tests. You didn’t often see airplanes this close.

  And then as the show continued here was Clara Lukaés coming through the woods from the main house. She wore a white evening gown. She carried her shoes in her hand. She peered up through the trees, she turned, she walked backward, she stopped, she stood on her toes. She moved through patches of light and shade, and reaching the little clearing in front of the cabin, she took me in with a glance and turned to see the plane in its run.

  It was very low this time. It drifted down the length of the lake and then dropped below the tree line.

  “Are you here?” Clara said. She passed into the house and I followed. She stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, and realizing she still held her shoes, she flung them away. At this moment the phone rang. It was in the bedroom and she ran in as if she was going to attack it.

  “What!” I heard her shout by way of greeting. A pause. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t count on it!” she said and slammed the phone down.

  I waited a minute. When she didn’t come out, I moved to the doorway. She was sitting on the edge of her bed in some distraction slipping off one shoulder strap, then the other, shrugging her gown to her waist. Losing all volition, she dropped her hands in her lap and sat hunched over without glamour or grace. Her hair was matted and tears streamed down her cheeks.

  She had no degrees of response, she lived hard, and the effect of her crying on my heart was calamitous. Her eyes were swollen almost immediately, her breasts were wet with her tears. Her looks collapsed as if they were a pretense.

  “Hey,” I said. “Come on. Come on.”

  After a while she stood up and let the gown fall to her ankles. She had nothing on underneath. She was big-breasted for such a thin narrow shouldered girl. She stepped out of the gown and went into the bathroom and a moment later I heard the shower running. Her behind was small and firm, if a bit on the flat side. The prominence of her backbone made me smile. It made me think of the scrawny backs on sunburned little girls who came to the carnival in their bathing suits and convened at the cotton candy.

  While she showered I found a percolator and put up some coffee. She came out wrapped in a white bath towel with a big maroon FWB monogrammed on the front. She accepted a mug of coffee and sat on the couch with her legs folded under her and held the mug with both hands as if for warmth. She had washed her hair, which lay about her head in wet curls, she was no longer crying but the exercise had left her eyes glistening and as she looked at me I wondered how I could have found anything to criticize. I had never in my life seen a woman more beautiful.

  “This place is getting on my nerves,” she said. “How do I get out of here?”

  “I’ll take care of it, leave it to me,” I said without a moment’s hesitation. Without a moment’s hesitation. She glanced at me as she sipped her coffee. I waited for my justice. I wondered if I had taken her too literally if she would laugh now crack my heart with her laughter. But she said nothing and seemed satisfied enough by my assurance. Sun filled the room. She put her cup on the floor and curled up on the sofa with her back to me.

  Drops of water glittered in her hair. After a while I realized she had gone to sleep.

  I ran out of there determined not to be amazed. I should concentrate on what I was going to do next. Amazement would set me back. I wanted to sing, I was exhilarated to madness. But the way to bring this off was to think of my brazen hopes as reasonable and myself as a calm practical person matter-of-factly making a life for himself that was no more than he deserved.

  Then Bennett himself was suddenly in full force in my life like a storm that had arrived.

  I found myself that same morning with three or four of the groundkeepers, each of us with a pick or shovel on our shoulders, we were hurrying to a site in the woods off the main bridle path. Bennett was waiting. He was standing on a hill of some sort. His horse was tethered to a tree along the trail. “Come up here,” he called.

  We climbed up the face of an enormous boulder imbedded in the ground. “I’ve always wondered about this,” he said. “I want it exposed.”

  The foreman of us, an older man long in the Bennett service, took off his cap and scratched his head. “You want us to dig this rock up?” he asked.

  “Dig around it,” Bennett said. “You see here? This is the top of it, we’re standing on top of it. That’s what this rise is. I want the whole thing uncovered, I don’t know why it’s here.”

  The workmen had trouble believing what he wanted. Bennett didn’t get mad. Instead, he took one of the picks and started going at it himself. “You see?” he called out, breathing hard between swings of the pick. “Work it away, like this. You see that, how it extends? Goes all the way over here.”

  “Here, Mr. Bennett,” the foreman said. “Don’t you be doing that. You, you,” he said to us. “Get to work.”

  So we started digging out a boulder that might be the size of a dirigible. Bennett watched each of us to see that we understood.

  “That’s the way,” he said. “That’s what I want.”

  He was sturdy and vigorous. Moved around a lot. A short wide-shouldered man with a large head. His hair was white but very full and combed as I combed mine, to a pompadour. He was well tanned. Blue eyes. A handsome blunt-faced old bastard in a riding outfit.

  I had expected someone older, more restrained.

  He climbed down off the rise and for several minutes crashed around in the woods nearby to see if he could find another rock like it. “You see,” he shouted, “it’s the only one. “Damnedest thing!” he called out as if we were all colleagues on some archaeological expedition.

  Then he mounted his horse and rode off in the direction of the stables. As soon as he was out of sight the foreman leaned on his shovel, took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” he said.

  We all sat down on the boulder.

  But a while later two more diggers came along flushed from their dens, and soon there were a half-dozen of us standing shirtless in the woods swinging our picks and shovels at this mountainous stone.

  It was interesting to me how the impulse of the man transformed into the hard work of the rest of us. By our digging we suggested something really important was going on, someone passing by would look at us and think it was serious—we ourselves were proof of the seriousness of the thing.

  I had expected not to like F. W. Bennett. But he was insane. How could I resist that? There was this manic energy of his, a mad light in his eye. He was free! That was what free men were like, they shone their freedom over everyone.

  I didn’t want to think what he did with Clara. I could not dream that she could matter to him in any way at all that I would recognize. I swung my pick. All the intelligence I had of him, from his house and his lands and his train and his resident poets, had not prepared me for the impersonal force of him, the frightening freedom of him.

  In the late afternoon we knocked off work, having unearthed the boulder to its southern polar slope. It sat now in an enormous trench at the bottom of which were packed several other stones. It looked as if it weighed several tons. On the way back we stopped in front of the main house to report these findings. Bennett stood on his front porch. He was very pleased. “We’ll take it as far down as it goes, boys,” he said. “And tomorrow we’ll look for markings. I want to see if it has markings.”

  Apparently as he gazed at these dirty and sweat-stained workmen he saw in the face of one something that might have been disbelief.

  “You, Joe,” he said to me, “you think it’s just a rock, don’t you?”

  I was so stunned that he knew my name I didn’t know what to say.

  “Come inside. I want you to see something.” He turned and went in the house.

  Someone reached ov
er and took the pick from my shoulder. I heard a snicker. I followed F. W. Bennett into his front hall and went past the stairway of halved logs to the sunken living room.

  There was a shimmering light on the ceiling, a reflection of the lake. But the floor was in shadow. In one corner, on a table, was a book with line drawings of primitive stone monuments: in all cases one large boulder rested on three or four smaller ones.

  “You see?” he said. “I’m not as crazy as you think. They put down these megaliths, or dolmens, for their fallen chiefs.”

  He strode around the room lecturing me on the burial practices of ancient Indian tribes of New England. He compared them to the ancient burial practices of the Western desert tribes. Indoors he seemed older. He was vigorous and moved constantly but his voice was somewhat hoarse, it suggested age.

  I stood in my filthy dark greens wondering how I was going to get out of there.

  A maid came in holding a phone on a long cord. She brought it to his side and held it for him on her palm while he picked up the receiver. “Yes?” He continued to move about, and the maid in her light green uniform followed him dutifully where he went, dealing with the cord so that it wouldn’t snag on the furniture. He was getting information. He asked short questions—How many? What time?—and listened to lengthy answers. I looked out the bay wall of windows. The late afternoon shadows made the lake a brilliant dark blue water.

  On the terrace a woman was arranging flowers in a vase. I realized I was looking at Lucinda Bailey Bennett, the aviatrix. The small shock of seeing someone famous.

  “You don’t know how to work cameras, by any chance?”

  The phone was gone. Bennett was talking to me.

  “I’ve got all this equipment here but I can’t get the hang of it myself,” he said. “I want to take proper pictures of the excavation and send them out to see if I’m right.”

  “I don’t know anything about cameras,” I said.

  “I thought you were smart… Well,” he said, “I wanted to take a look at you, anyway, to see if you belong with me on a permanent basis. What’s your opinion?”