— Were you lost? Thomas asked.
— Very cute.
— I am very cute. You’re blind.
— He’s psychic, he knows me better than I know myself.
— And that makes you happy, Thomas said, flatly.
— Yes, it does.
— And you can love him, Thomas said, flat-lining now.
She lost color, at least she lost color, he thought later.
— Yes, I can. I do. I’m sorry, Tommy.
He hated her saying Tommy.
— What about your mother?
— Billy let her, or he let me — he expelled her.
— Like an exorcism, Thomas joked.
— Sort of, she said. Don’t laugh. It can happen.
— Accidents happen, he said.
— No, she said, Billy did it.
— You fell in love with him, I’m not a moron.
She invited him to the wedding anyway.
Thomas now hated Webster with conviction, and wished he had not been decent about making an appearance at the wedding, even though he attended more as a ghost than a person, but still, he was complying with a ritual form of masochism. He thought he hated her, he hoped so, and he strode purposefully out of the tent, to cover so much ground that the tent would disappear, as if it were his bad dream, the wedding, and Grace an aerie faerie, and Billy Webster a devil with a slimy coat, sour, steamy sweat oozing, a tiny, hairy penis, or a mouse where the phallus should have been. Thomas saw him go up in a puff of smoke. All the while he felt someone was close behind him, so he strode faster, running away, exercising his legs, but he didn’t look back.
The field turned into a forest, and when Thomas reached a pond, the tent gone to a recent past, he sat upon a log near the water, heard birds singing inside the profound quiet, and dirtied the seat of his suit on the wet log with perverse pleasure. I can’t go back now, he decided. Does she really believe that junk?
His twin sister, Antoinette — Tony — might. Her girlfriend’s day job was as a lab technician, but she was also a working psychic, and while his twin sister wasn’t in thrall or attuned to voices from beyond or the like, Tony sympathized with those who were. Because their mother thought it was all junk, the way Thomas did. Their mother was beautiful, still, very much in love with their father, who returned her love, and his twin had always felt left out. Her mother either didn’t pay enough attention to her, or too much, of the bad kind, overly praised her, which sounded false to Tony, or belittled her, she said. His twin blamed their mother for everything that went wrong in her life, but he didn’t. He loved her.
The last time the twins talked, over drinks, he had managed not to press a single incendiary button, steering their course through comfort zones, but then Tony said, her lips pressed against her teeth, “Mother didn’t love me, she loved you because you were a boy. She’s a bitch.” She sat back in her chair, opening her legs wide like a muscleman on a subway car. Tony was more butch than he was. She liked sports and working out, she’d always been butch and, as a child, acted as if she believed if Thomas were nice, he would have changed his sex for her. Now he supposed he could cut off his penis and have the flesh made into a vagina with folds, but the thought made him sick. He just couldn’t, he liked his penis, and, even if he did change his sex, Tony wouldn’t be satisfied.
When Tony mentioned “our mother” again, Thomas absentmindedly lifted a large plastic cup of water to his mouth, couldn’t hold it somehow, and instead juggled it, kept juggling, until the cup flew into the air and doused his sister and him in spring water. Laughing, wiping herself off, she said, “If you’d soaked just me, Bro, I’d have wondered.” Later, he realized his unconscious had helped him throw cold water on the conversation, a literal-minded unconscious, and kind of great.
Tony had her revenge. He left town sometime after that, and she wanted to stay in his apartment as a break from her too-attentive lover, and he said, as he opened the door to leave, Don’t break anything, OK? This stuff is precious to me. He shut the door behind him, and she marched over to the refrigerator for a beer, then to the Prouvé chair he’d paid a fortune for, plopped down on it, and it crumbled beneath her. That’s what she told him when he returned.
Thomas had never liked birds much, and now they were his company. He twisted around, angled his head back, sensing something standing behind him, but there was nothing. I’m thinking it, I want someone there, I’m willing it, Grace, probably, I want her. He called her name, Grace, Grace, Grace, to an indifferent forest, which regularly responded to wild breezes, not words, and then when his echo disconcerted him, her name bouncing back emptily, he concentrated on hating her, hating what he’d loved. It was better than loving and missing her, having her in absentia only. What will come now? What will happen? The future might stroke him with good fortune or lash him with lies and broken promises, all uncontrollable, like his unconscious, which allowed him to do what he wanted but couldn’t in good conscience, allowed him what he feared, and safely enabled him to engage in gory scenes, loveless sex, abusive and ugly acts with his enemies and even friends. Who was a friend, anyway? Self-interest and betrayal climaxed together, satisfied bedfellows and lovers, common as dirt. He wiped the seat of his trousers without mirth.
Another love like this could shatter him, he’d crack up, go mad, or be forever changed, and he wanted that, to be out of himself, to believe ideas he absolutely never had, suddenly, and he also wished for stability and hardly any — no — he wanted no more sad surprises. He loved Grace, what a joke. What if he always loved her, what if he couldn’t stop, what if he could never have what he wanted. There was too much he couldn’t control. He might as well wish on a star, have his fortune read, believe in obscure pseudoscientific lore, astrology, or handwriting analysis, roll the dice, or throw a penny into this placid pond, his own Trevi Fountain. Thomas humored himself imagining farmers at the pond tossing in coins, dimes and quarters probably — the cost of wishes must be inflated, too — and if he peered in, he knew he’d see his reflection.
So, in the same, whimsical mood, he called up the myth of Narcissus. It seemed fitting, Narcissus’ attachment to himself, to a reflection, all surface, though Echo loved him anyway. Her fate doomed her to repeat his words, which Narcissus might have ambivalently appreciated, since some men like to hear themselves talk and hear themselves in subservient women. Thomas, somewhat uncomfortably and almost against his will, he’d say later, looked down, but he didn’t see his face. He saw the moss-covered still water, and soon, through the interstices of green slime, a woman’s face floating a foot beneath the surface. Distorted, old, rotten. Disbelieving, even alarmed, he turned again, but again there was no creature behind him, and all the while the birds continued to vocalize their complaints and desires in a euphonious chorus, interrupted by a few squawks.
He stared at the rotten face, hoping to see something. It felt imperative now to realize something, to apprehend—“make it work” was his design credo. He felt, suddenly, less sure of himself than ever, but maybe there would come a sign to help him, though wishing for that made him feel more vulnerable. He stared, and occasionally a trace of his own reflection filtered through the muck, but only for a moment until the watery mirror exposed her face once more. The face changed, by the flow of water, he thought, its labile movements. And as he stared, meditating on her, or it, and this oddness, he noticed something, the thing behind him that wasn’t there and the thing in front that was and yet wasn’t. It wasn’t clear, it was more a sensation than an idea or image. But then it became an idea: the face was Grace’s dead mother’s. She had, like Virginia Woolf, drowned herself, a suicide, that was why Grace couldn’t love. And then: Grace’s mother had been murdered, that’s why her face looked hideous, she died in terror, thrown into a river. In either case, her mother was condemned to haunt the waterways of New Hampshire. So: Grace never stopped mourning her mother and hating her, too, her mother had left her, had not loved her, and how could unloved Grace love — that must be it. But Billy Webster had made Grace know her mother was gone, he let her go for Grace. No, he told her that her mother had been kidnapped, that’s what Webster insisted, and she had never wanted to leave Grace, and she believed him.