He felt all the more ashamed, not only for having been harsh but also for prying into her heartpourings to her young boy — none of his business! He was an old man eavesdropping on children. So he turned to the letters from the year when she was dying, and read: Are you really such a sweetheart? How could I have not known that about you? You know I don’t want to ask you questions because I don’t want to pry. Do you care if I do? Someday I’ll write you about something — a really vivid memory I have of something we did in high school. You’ll really laugh and kick yourself that you didn’t know what I thought. What right did he have to spy on this doomed married woman and the man with whom she platonically flirted? He was a grime-eaten angel whose stone trumpet was as cracked as his penis.
How have I forgotten so much? I was certain I’d never let go any of it. And it hasn’t really been long! Why can’t I remember more? It’s as if my seventeen-year-old Victoria were but a blurry, roughed-out figurine of jeweler’s wax — or a shapeless corpse. I’ll go to her — tonight, and tomorrow night, if I’m well enough. No, I’ll remember her tonight and study the moon map. Those photographs help me at least as much as does visiting her. And if I stay too long at the cemetery I’ll get sicker; I can feel my tumor when I’m there, for some reason. So let me just read her letters once more — not the ones I don’t remember but the ones I’ve come to know again.
Outside the window, his conception of Victoria hovered in the trees like a solitary gall.
So much of the loveliness of that summer had had to do with waiting for her; sometimes he met her once a week, occasionally more often. Until their next meeting he had her latest letter to read over and over with desperate happiness.
Shyly, desperately, happily the boy followed the blonde girl with his eyes. He slept with her letters under his pillow. Since she was more a part of her family than he of his, her letters sometimes described her brother and her sister, or her mother’s health. He was never in her home; he never saw her bedroom.
Does old age invariably imagine youth to be a more innocent time? After all, babies keep getting made and grownups keep getting depraved. In any event, he almost never even held her hand. He never passed a night with her; nor was he with her at that moment past dawn when the cicadas begin to stridulate. He did remember meeting her in a park; he had walked and she had ridden her bicycle. The grass was so green around them that the greenness had stained the inside of his skull, although now it was verdigrised, a penny in a skeleton’s hand. He remembered the summer humidity, and her lovely young face; but their time together never exceeded two or three hours, and sometimes she didn’t come as she had promised.
Just as Victoria’s not yet reread letters lay waiting for him nearly as invitingly as when they had been new — all the more now, perhaps, for the white envelopes had aged ever so delicately to cream, their thirteen-cent stamps were sweetly antique, the writing on them was precious since the hand was dead, never mind the modest yet significant alteration of the English language since then — and the unremembered contents could not affright him more than any page in some old love story (besides, it wouldn’t end until that horrible orange envelope) — so this morning, and the summer world flowing from it, promised him an innocuous sweetness. The dawn was not far gone; the breeze was cool. Feeling less unwell than usual, he decided for that day to live his life instead of Victoria’s.
Behind Hal Murmuracki’s Chapel of Flowers was an abandoned gas station, after which the swamp began. Nobody he knew had gone there. In truth, he was less of an adventurer than Luke or Isaac; he entered the swamp almost as an exercise; had his tumor tortured him as much as usual, he would have been satisfied to be alone in repose, in his bed, his own place; he didn’t need to set out anywhere; he was already suited to being dead. But (so Luke might have said) why not try what did not suit him?
As sky and meadows brightened behind the cool reeds, he felt grateful for the newness of life, and nearly believed himself to be healthy. Happy thoughts of previous women illuminated him in much the same way that morning light jitters back and forth on the spiderwebs between jade reeds; rather than perceiving complete strands, one sees continually altering segments of midair brightness.
When last night’s darkness slinks back into reed-shade, one feels the opportunity to play an important part: Very soon I too will make something of myself; I long to; I expect to; for who could waste this morning light? Before the sun has drunk away everything, I will drink my share from the cool breath of reeds just as I have drunk and will drink again from Victoria’s cool reed-breath… — But then, when the light exposes each reed in earnest, leaving only outlines shadowed, disappointment arrives. — Once he had seen the corpse of a young murdered woman who had been looking forward to a party. Not yet autopsied, she lay in her pink dress, with pink ribbons in her hair, her face bloody and yellow; and the stink of excrement from her abdominal wound was the smell of disappointment. Had her dress been alive, it would have wished to fly away from her; it could still be happy and dance. Here lay a woman who had very likely herself been happy sometimes, who had hurried in excitement to her death, and now there was nothing but disillusionment and failure.
In his memory that pink dress resembled a shady place not yet overrun by solar heat; still the night fragrance could hide here for another quarter-hour, defying the encircling day. But in full light, with the chance to make something of himself now once more safely past, the green reeds were going a lovely silver, their tips whitewashed so newly, the birds now awake (by now the cemetery grass would be a dreary orange-brown); and still he thought to improve his day just as morning gilds grassheads and wet grass. Morning presented him with the colors of berries and the songs of meadowlarks, the dark water beneath bright reeds, algae’d water like jellied jade, two rabbits chasing each other in a circle — and now in the widening of the morning, the smell of reeds and water began to be superseded by the delicious odors of trees.
The whipping of the trees made him queasy. It was the trees, nothing else. If only they would stop! Closing his eyes did not help, because he knew that the trees were still writhing. Making another effort, he stared them down. They swayed until he could no longer remember every place that they had been, which was when he vomited. So he got into his car and drove home. Needless to say, no time of day is as profitless to ghost-lovers as high noon, particularly in summer. Life sweats away our thanatotic idealizations, and then where are we? Toying with two of Victoria’s unremembered letters, he smiled, but decided to treasure them as they were for a while longer. It was not right to decant her sayings when he felt less than his best.
It was a very hot day. He lay in misery, waiting for his prescription narcotics to rescue him. He would not reenter the hospital; those people would weigh down his misery with powerlessness, and he would still die. Cheered by his determination to be free (and forgetting that he had already made it), he opened a letter and read: