“No, no, not yet,” said Janet Evason Belin. “Just hold it. Let me rest.”
“Now. Again.”
XV
A dozen beautiful “girls” each “brushing” and “combing” her long, silky “hair,” each “longing” to “catch a man.”
XVI
I fell in love at twenty-two.
A dreadful intrusion, a sickness. Vittoria, whom I did not even know. The trees, the bushes, the sky, were all sick with love. The worst thing (said Janet) is the intense familiarity, the sleepwalker’s conviction of having blundered into an eruption of one’s own inner life, the yellow-pollinating evergreen brushed and sticky with my own good humor, the flakes of myself falling invisibly from the sky to melt on my own face.
In your terms, I was distractedly in love. Whileawayans account for cases of this by referring back to the mother-child relationship: cold potatoes when you feel it. There used to be an explanation by way of our defects, but common human defects can be used to explain anything, so what’s the use. And there’s a mathematical analogy, a four-dimensional curve that I remember laughing at. Oh, I was bleeding to death.
Love—to work like a slave, to work like a dog. The same exalted, feverish attention fixed on everything. I didn’t make a sign to her because she didn’t make a sign to me; I only tried to control myself and to keep people away from me. That awful diffidence. I was at her too, all the time, in a nervous parody of friendship. Nobody can be expected to like that compulsiveness. In our family hall, like the Viking mead-hall where the bird flies in from darkness and out again into darkness, under the blown-up pressure dome with the fans bringing in the scent of roses, I felt my own soul fly straight up into the roof. We used to sit with the lights off in the long spring twilight; a troop of children had passed by the week before, selling candles, which one or another woman would bring in and light. People drifted in and out, lifting the silk flap to the dome entrance. People ate at different times, you see. When Vitti left for outside, I followed her. We don’t have lawns as you do, but around our dwellings we plant a kind of trefoil which keeps the other things off; small children always assume it’s there for magical reasons. It’s very soft. It was getting dark, too. There’s a planting from New Forest near the farmhouse and we wandered toward it, Vitti idle and saying nothing.
“I’ll be leaving in six months,” I said. “Going to New City to get tied in with the power plants.”
Silence. I was miserably conscious that Vittoria was going somewhere and I should know where because someone had told me, but I couldn’t remember.
“I thought you might like company,” I said.
No answer. She had picked up a stick and was taking the heads off weeds with it. It was one of the props for the computer receiver pole, knocked into the ground at one end and into the pole itself at the other. I had to ignore her being there or I couldn’t have continued walking. Ahead were the farm’s trees, breaking into the fields on the dim horizon like a headland or a cloud. “The moon’s up,” I said. See the moon. Poisoned with arrows and roses, radiant Eros coming at you out of the dark. The air so mild you could bathe in it. I’m told my first sentence as a child was See the Moon, by which I think I must have meant: pleasant pain, balmy poison, preserving gall, choking sweet. I imagined Vittoria cutting her way out of the night with that stick, whirling it around her head, leaving bruises in the earth, tearing up weeds, slashing to pieces the roses that climbed around the computer poles. There was no part of my mind exempt from the thought: if she moves in this quicksilver death, it’ll kill me.
We reached the trees. (I remember, she’s going to Lode-Pigro to put up buildings. Also, it’ll be hotter here in July. It’ll be intensely hot, probably not bearable.) The ground between them was carpeted in needles, speckled with moonlight. We dissolved fantastically into that extraordinary medium, like mermaids, like living stories; I couldn’t see anything. There was the musky odor of dead needles, although the pollen itself is scentless. If I had told her, “Vittoria, I’m very fond of you,” or “Vittoria, I love you,” she might answer, “You’re O.K. too, friend,” or “Yes, sure, let’s make it,” which would misrepresent something or other, though I don’t know just what, quite intolerably and I would have to kill myself—I was very odd about death in those strange days. So I did not speak or make a sign but only strolled on, deeper and deeper into that fantastic forest, that enchanted allegory, and finally we came across a fallen log and sat on it
“You’ll miss—” said Vitti.
I said, “Vitti, I want—”
She stared straight ahead, as if displeased. Sex does not matter in these things, nor age, nor time, nor sense, we all know that. In the daytime you can see that the trees have been planted in straight rows, but the moonlight was confusing all that
A long pause here.
“I don’t know you,” I said at last. The truth was we had been friends for a long time, good friends. I don’t know why I had forgotten that so completely. Vitti was the anchor in my life at school, the chum, the pal; we had gossiped together, eaten together. I knew nothing about her thoughts now and can’t report them, except for my own fatuous remarks. Oh, the dead silence! I groped for her hand but couldn’t find it in the dark; I cursed myself and tried to stay together in that ghastly moonlight, shivers of unbeing running through me like a net and over all the pleasure of pain, the dreadful longing.
“Vitti, I love you.”
Go away! Was she wringing her hands?
“Love me!”
No! and she threw one arm up to cover her face. I got down on my knees but she winced away with a kind of hissing screech, very like the sound an enraged gander makes to warn you and be fair. We were both shaking from head to foot. It seemed natural that she should be ready to destroy me. I’ve dreamed of looking into a mirror and seeing my alter ego which, on its own initiative, begins to tell me unbearable truths and, to prevent such, threw my arms around Vittoria’s knees while she dug her fingers into my hair; thus connected we slid down to the forest floor. I expected her to beat my head against it. We got more equally together and kissed each other, I expecting my soul to flee out of my body, which it did not do. She is untouchable. What can I do with my dearest X, Y, or Z, after all? This is Vitti, whom I know, whom I like; and the warmth of that real affection inspired me with more love, the love with more passion, more despair, enough disappointment for a whole lifetime. I groaned miserably. I might as well have fallen in love with a tree or a rock. No one can make love in such a state. Vitti’s fingernails were making little hard crescents of pain on my arms; she had that mulish look I knew so well in her; I knew something was coming off. It seemed to me that we were victims of the same catastrophe and that we ought to get together somewhere, in a hollow tree or under a bush, to talk it over. The old women tell you to wrestle, not fight, or you may end up with a black eye; Vitti, who had my fingers in her hands, pressing them feverishly, bent the smallest one back against the joint. Now that’s a good idea. We scuffled like babies, hurting my hand, and she bit me on it; we pushed and pulled at each other, and I shook her until she rolled over on top of me and very earnestly hit me across the face with her fist. The only relief is tears. We lay sobbing together. What we did after that I think you know, and we sniffled and commiserated with each other. It even struck us funny, once. The seat of romantic love is the solar plexus while the seat of love is elsewhere, and that makes it very hard to make love when you are on the point of dissolution, your arms and legs penetrated by moonlight, your head cut off and swimming freely on its own like some kind of mutated monster. Love is a radiation disease. Whileawayans do not like the self-consequence that comes with romantic passion and we are very mean and mocking about it; so Vittoria and I walked back separately, each frightened to death of the weeks and weeks yet to go before we’d be over it. We kept it to ourselves. I felt it leave me two and a half months later, at one particular point in time: I was putting a handful of cracked corn to my mouth and licking the sludge off my fingers. I felt the parasite go. I swallowed philosophically and that was that. I didn’t even have to tell her.