I didn't know the answers to any of these questions. I know all of them now. Not the answers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge-I'm not sure he had any answers, since he was hopped up on drugs at the time-but my own answers. Here they are, for what they're worth.
The sacred river is alive. It flows to the lifeless ocean, because that's where all things that are alive end up. The lover is a demon-lover because he isn't there. The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of ice because that's what pleasure-domes have-after a while they become very cold, and after that they melt, and then where are you? All wet. Mount Abora was the Abyssinian maid's home, and she was singing about it because she couldn't get back to it. The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
The snow fell, softly at first, then in hard pellets that stung the skin like needles. The sun set in the afternoon, the sky changed from washed blood to skim milk. Smoke poured from the chimneys, from the furnaces stoked with coal. The bread-wagon horses left piles of steaming brown buns on the street which then froze solid. Children threw them at one another. The clocks struck midnight, over and over, every midnight a deep blue-black riddled with icy stars, the moon white bone. I looked out the bedroom window, down to the sidewalk, through the branches of the chestnut tree. Then I turned out the light.
The Xanadu ball was the second Saturday in January. My costume had come that morning, in a box with armfuls of tissue paper. The smart thing to do was to rent your costume from Malabar's, because to have one specially made would be displaying too much of an effort. Now it was almost six o'clock and I was trying it on. Laura was in my room: she would often do her homework there, or make a show of doing it. "What are you supposed to be?" she said.
"The Abyssinian Maid," I said. What I would do for a dulcimer I wasn't yet sure. Perhaps a banjo, with ribbons added. Then I remembered that the only banjo I knew about was back at Avilion, in the attic, left over from my dead uncles. I would have to skip the dulcimer.
I didn't expect Laura to tell me I looked pretty, or nice even. She never did that: pretty andnice were not categories of thought for her. This time she said, "You aren't very Abyssinian. Abyssinians aren't supposed to be blonde."
"I can't help the colour of my hair," I said. "It's Winifred's fault. She should have chosen Vikings or something."
"Why are they all afraid of him?" said Laura.
"Afraid of who?" I said. (I hadn't considered the fear in this poem, only the pleasure. Thepleasure-dome. The pleasure-dome was where I really lived now-where I had my true being, unknown to those around me. With walls and towers girdled round, so nobody else could get in.)
"Listen," she said. She recited, with her eyes closed: Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
"See, they're afraid of him," she said, "but why? Why Beware?"
"Really, Laura, I have no idea," I said. "It's just a poem. You can't always tell what poems mean. Maybe they think he's crazy."
"It's because he's too happy," said Laura. "He's drunk the milk of Paradise. It frightens people when you're too happy, in that way. Isn't that why?"
"Laura, don't keepat me," I said. "I don't know everything, I'm not a professor."
Laura was sitting on the floor, in her school kilt. She sucked on her knuckle, staring up at me, disappointed. I was disappointing her frequently of late. "I saw Alex Thomas the other day," she said.
I turned away quickly, adjusted my veil in the mirror. It was a fairly poor effect, the green satin: some Hollywood vamp in a desert movie. I comforted myself with the thought that everyone else would look equally faux. "Alex Thomas? Really?" I said. I should have displayed more surprise.
"Well, aren't you glad?"
"Glad about what?"
"Glad he's alive," she said. "Glad they haven't caught him."
"Of course I'm glad," I said. "But don't say anything to anyone. You wouldn't want them to track him down."
"You don't need to tell me that. I'm not a baby. That's why I didn't wave at him."
"Did he see you?" I said.
"No. He was just walking along the street. He had his coat collar up and his scarf over his chin, but I knew it was him. He had his hands in his pockets."
At the mention of hands, of pockets, a sharp pang went through me. "What street was this?"
"Our street," she said. "He was on the other side, looking at the houses. I think he was looking for us. He must know we live around here."
"Laura," I said, "have you still got a crush on Alex Thomas? Because if you do, you should try to get over it."
"I don't have a crush on him," she said with scorn. "I never had a crush. Crush is a horrible word. It really stinks. " She'd become less pious since going to school, and her language had become a good deal stronger. Stinks was in the ascendant.
"Whatever you want to call it, you should give it up. It's just not possible," I said gently. "It will only make you unhappy."
Laura put her arms around her knees. "Unhappy," she said. "What on earth do you know aboutunhappy?"
Eight
Carnivore stories
He's moved again, which is just as well. She hated that place out by the Junction. She didn't like going there, and in any case it was so far, and so cold then: every time she got to it her teeth were chattering. She hated the narrow cheerless room, the stink of old cigarettes because you couldn't open the stuck window, the sordid little shower in the corner, that woman she'd meet on the stairs-a woman like a downtrodden peasant in some musty old novel, you kept expecting to see her with a bundle of sticks on her back. The sullen insolent stare she'd give, as if picturing exactly what would go on behind his door once it was closed. A stare of envy, but also of spite.
Good riddance to all of that.
Now the snow has melted, though a few grey smudges of it remain in the shadows. The sun is warm, there's the smell of damp earth and stirring roots and the sodden vestiges of last winter's discarded newspapers, blurred and illegible. In the better sections of the city the daffodils are out, and, in a few front gardens where there's no shade, there are tulips, red and orange. A note of promise, as the gardening column says; though even now, in late April, it snowed the other day-big white sloppy flakes, a freakish blizzard.
She's hidden her hair under a kerchief, worn a navy blue coat, the closest she could get to sombre. He said it would be best. In the nooks and corners down here, tomcat scents and vomit, the reek of crated chickens. Horse dung on the road, from the mounted policemen who keep an eye out, not for thieves but for agitators-nests of foreign Reds, whispering together like rats in straw, six to a bed no doubt, sharing their women, incubating their warped, intricate plots. Emma Goldman, exiled from the States, is said to live somewhere nearby.
Blood on the sidewalk, a man with a bucket and brush. She steps fastidiously around the wet pink puddle. It's a region of kosher butchers; also of tailors, of wholesale furriers. And sweatshops, no doubt. Rows of immigrant women hunched over machines, their lungs filling with lint.
The clothes on your back come off somebody else's, he'd said to her once. Yes, she'd replied lightly, but I look better in them. Then added with some anger, What do you want me todo? What do you wantme to do? Do you seriously think I have any power?
She stops at a greengrocer's, buys three apples. Not very good apples, last season's, their skins softly wrinkling, but she feels she needs a peace offering of some kind. The woman takes one of the apples away from her, points out a punky brown spot, substitutes a better apple. All this without speaking. Meaningful nods and gap-toothed smiles.