‘Hear that?’ she asked Heather and me. ‘Hear it?’
‘What?’ we asked.
‘That big booming voice, full of thunderbolts and glee,’ she said. ‘And it’s saying, “Explore… explore!”‘
She sprinted towards the manor house to oblige, sprinting surprisingly well considering the forty extra pounds’ worth of backpack and sleeping bag.
Heather and I opted for a more leisurely pace. Because her legs were not nearly as long as Vanessa’s, I knew that Heather was afraid how she might look by comparison, that anything less than reminiscent of a gazelle wouldn’t be worth the effort.
‘Just once I’d like to be the first one to hear the voices,’ said Heather. ‘Just once I’d like to be the one to tell her what they’re saying.’
‘Well, don’t you think she’s probably been hearing voices her whole life?’
‘Life is just so weird,’ and then Heather laughed. ‘All that time you and me thinking we’re regular people and then we both fall in love with Joan of Arc.’
‘Don’t forget, I fell in love with you first,’ I told her, and hoped that this would always be enough to sustain us through whatever else we might be lacking. As though, deep down, I didn’t suspect that each of us knew better.
Heather’s mother, zoned on tranquillisers and launching herself nine floors towards the limousine that had glided up in front of the hotel to whisk her husband to a campaign appearance…
That was love too. Or at the very least the end result.
Realistically I cannot say that I was expecting this arrangement, this trinity we had formed, to work for a lifetime, or even for a decade. I’d never heard of these things lasting for any duration, everyone’s love and affection and ardour bifurcating equally. Such a delicate balance to maintain, able to tip so easily, someone beginning to feel that they’re getting the lesser end of the bargain, then demanding one partner or the other make a choice. All right, so there was the poet Ezra Pound, with a wife and a mistress who were crazy for each other, but I couldn’t shake this feeling, the laudable attributes of Heather and Vanessa notwithstanding, that I had used up my personal share of good fortune already.
Heather and I had been together for years before Vanessa entered the picture. Heather was the one who met her first, Vanessa temping for a receptionist out on maternity leave at the brokerage firm where Heather gambled on the Dow Jones with other people’s money. This was one of Vanessa’s quote/unquote respectable phases, when five mornings a week fiscal realities sent her to the end of her closet that she didn’t really like to visit, and impelled her to leave her hair one colour, an alien amongst people she could fool into thinking she was no different.
It was talk of suicide that nailed together the bridge between them, the first commonality that they’d realised they shared. Heather’s mother, of course, and a couple of years ago Vanessa’s younger brother had hung himself two months after his university commencement. He’d run up nearly thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt while a student, more and more companies sending him new cards or raising his limits, and he saw no other way out from under the burden. Ever since, Vanessa had been attempting to sue the banks for wrongful death. As though she could get anywhere in a system so beautifully designed to indenture its slaves at ever-younger ages.
All of which comprised a strange, even morbid, basis for the two of them to start going out for lunch together, but there you go, and as so often happens between co-workers who’ve begun looking at each other over menus, one thing led to another, and, rather abruptly, a few nights each week Heather started working extra hours. That old euphemism.
Once living the lie ballooned up with too much pressure at home — four or five weeks, something like that — she burst into tears and told me what had really been going on. It was far less a confession than a great avalanche of bewilderment, half or more of all the assumptions she’d taken for granted about herself now being called into rigorous question.
And I tried, really tried, to react the way I was supposed to, to get enraged over the betrayal, and had it been another man I might’ve found it easier, but I couldn’t, just couldn’t summon the fury, because I was intrigued and it wasn’t so much out of base prurience as suddenly feeling as though I’d spent our years together with my eyes half-closed and now they were beginning to open, and when I looked at Heather and her tears and her confusion all I could think was I didn’t have one clue you had this in you. But neither had she, so at least we were even.
‘I’m not supposed to want her, this isn’t the way I’m supposed to be,’ Heather said.
‘Yeah, who told you that?’ I said, but hardly had to ask, so then I said, ‘Well, just about everything your parents told you about themselves and each other was a lie, so what makes you think they knew what they were talking about when it came to you?’
Which upset her further for a while, because she was the only one allowed to bad-mouth her family.
‘So you’re not mad?’ she asked later, once this lesser storm had passed.
‘I’m too tired to be mad,’ I said, and wondered if maybe that wasn’t a huge part of all the problems we’d never even stopped to realise we had.
We caught up with Vanessa inside the manor house, this ill-kept hulk gone far down the road to ruin. High-ceilinged and dank within, it was now a home fit for little else but mice and ghosts, although rather than diminish its grandeur, the state of the place only took that grandeur and turned it tragic. You could look at the staircase, dingy and splintered, and envision what it had once been, polished and gleaming in the mellow sunlight from the tall leaded windows. Could look at one of the cold fireplaces, filled now with leaves and grit, and imagine a blazing log that had taken four strong hands to wrestle onto the grate.
‘Charming starter palace for young royal newlyweds,’ said Vanessa, to no one in particular. ‘Needs a little work.’
She’d temped for a real estate agency, too. Have to assume she learned how to read between the lines.
We wandered about, spotting the occasional evidence of prior squatters and steering clear of the unstable end where the wall had collapsed. A yawning, broken-timbered fracture now framed a ragged view of lawn and trees, but the pile of rubble looked too trifling to refill the hole, all the bricks worth salvaging long since hauled away by some frugal herdsman.
It was the gardens out back, or rather what had become of them, that really seized our fancy. Season after season, year upon year, hedges and flowerbeds and ferns had been abandoned to run riot over a couple of acres enclosed within a high stone wall. Vines had woven treacherous mats over flagstones and pathways; moss and lichens had crept up from the bases of statuary and birdbaths. A small fishpond, replenished solely by the frequent rain, had grown thick with algae, resounding with the plop of frogs when we came near. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever seen so many shades of green.
Even the walls surrounding the enclosure had succumbed to the onslaught, most of them carpeted in ivy, and Heather pointed to the sleek black shapes perched atop them that watched us or probed for insects under the greenery.
‘If anyone tries to clip your wings,’ she called to the ravens, ‘I hope you peck their eyes out!’
They stopped, heads cocked and beaks stilled. They listened, or seemed to. One squawked with its loud, ugly voice.
‘You almost get the feeling they understand,’ I said. ‘It’s that damned Hitchcock movie, you know.’
‘Well, as birds go, they’re sure not stupid, ravens aren’t,’ Vanessa said. She wrapped her arms around Heather from behind and regarded the ravens with a wistful smile, and why not — consorts of gods and goddesses, eaters of the dead on sword-strewn battlefields, bearers of arcana, these birds and their mystery and their downright pagan mythos were just the sort of things closest to her heart. In her daydreams, I was certain that they whispered in her ear as surely as they were to have whispered into Odin’s.