A night or so ago, after one of these dreams, I got up and put on the light and started to write this last chapter.
I told Clovis about this writing. It’s a book now. An autobiography. Or is it a Greek Tragedy? Clovis said, “Don’t try and publish it, for heaven’s sake. They’ll throw you in jail. I hear the food is awful.”
Somehow, I never thought of publishing. Only of someone coming on the pages, years from now, buried in the ground in a moistureproof container, say, or hidden under a random floorboard in the slum.
But it’s pointless. There isn’t any reason. Reasonless. All of it.
It’s strange. I didn’t want to start writing this last part, and now I can’t seem to stop. You see, when I stop, I break my last link with him. With my love. Yes, he’ll always be with me, but not him. I’ll be alone. I’ll be alone.
But I am alone. These pieces of paper can’t help me.
And so I’ll stop writing.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mother. Do you realize you’re rich enough to buy the City Senate?
Yes, Jane. A number of times over.
I’m so glad, Mother, because that’s exactly what I want you to do.
Jane, I don’t understand you at all.
No, Mother. You never understood me. But let’s be adult about this.
That would be an excellent plan, dear.
The reason I want you to buy the Senate, Mother, is so that I can safely publish this manuscript.
Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the manuscript contains?
You’re quite right, Mother, it mentions you. Not in a very luminous light. However, I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else, instead of where it is. And so on.
Jane. I should like to know why you want to publish.
Not to make money. Not to discredit anyone. Not to inflame the poor, of whom I’m now one. In fact, I really don’t know. It isn’t melancholia, either, or bitterness. Even exhibitionism. But this crazy thing happened. You’d react to the last chapter, Mother, really you would. Perhaps you ought to read it…
• 1 •
By the time they’d taken the stitches out, and I’d had my first descarring treatment (“Jane, you can’t go about looking like a walking advert for Nihilism”), Leo had made his third and most successful attempt to move into Clovis’s apartment. Of course, Clovis’s apartment was three hundred times better than Leo’s. But mostly it was infatuation. Leo, dark-haired, tall and slim, as usual, would loll about the place, unable to take his eyes off Clovis. Leo would actually spill tea and wine from looking at Clovis instead of at what he was doing. And once Leo had an attack of migraine, the kind that affects the sight, and as he sat there with his hands over his eyes, waiting for his pills to get rid of it, he quaveringly said, “I always panic it’ll never go, that I’ll stay blind. And then I’d never see you again.”
“How true,” said Clovis unkindly. “You wouldn’t see me for dust.”
I rather liked Leo. He didn’t seem to resent my presence in the apartment, and even flirted with me: “My goodness, why isn’t she a boy?” I never knew if it was tact or ignorance that kept him from commenting on my state.
Clovis, though, became restless, and went out a lot, leaving Leo in possession but unhappily unpossessed.
I was trying by then to think what I was going to do with the rest of my empty life. A labor card would be out of the question, my mother had seen to that, reestablishing my credit rating, even if I wouldn’t use it. So I couldn’t hope for legal work, even if I could do anything. And I couldn’t go on living off Clovis—I didn’t want to do Chloe’s trick and stay there ten months. But then, I didn’t know what I wanted, or rather, I wanted nothing at all.
“The way you now look,” said Clovis, “you could model.”
But there are models by the hundred and my strange face would never fit, even if my body now did.
“Why don’t you write something again, this time commercial?”
“I’d have to pay for the first printing.”
“I’d give you the money.”
So I did try to write, a couple of stories, but nothing would come. The characters were always the same, people I know—Clovis, Demeta, Egyptia. And I could never get past the first page. Forty or so first pages. I didn’t try to write about Silver. I’d said all there was I could say, and it hadn’t been enough.
Involved in myself, I didn’t take any notice of the inevitable trend in the Clovis-Leo situation. Then one afternoon Clovis stalked in glittering with the rain which had replaced the snow. He flung his nineteenth-century coat at the closet, which caught it, and announced: “This morning I got a hideous rambling letter from Egyptia. Someone took her up to a tomb in the desert on the pretext she looked like some princess out of antiquity. And as they stood there on the moonlit sand, next to a handy sphinx, a slender ghost is supposed to have flitted by.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts?” said Leo.
“Do you?”
“I’m superstitious. Most actors are. Yes, I believe in them. My theatre over on Star is supposed to be haunted. If you’d come and be my Hamlet there, you might see the haunt—”
“You give me a good idea,” said Clovis. “We can hold a seance here.”
Leo laughed. “Here? You’re joking.”
“Am I?”
Clovis produced the seance table and the glass and the plastic cards with letters and numbers up to ten.
“Well, it’s supposed to be bad luck, isn’t it?”
“Lucky for some,” said Clovis.
He began to set out the cards.
“I think I’d rather go for a walk,” said Leo.
“Fine. Jane and I will have the seance without you.”
“Oh.”
“Won’t we, Jane?” Clovis didn’t look at me. Part of me wanted to say: “Do your own dirty work,” but it was less complicated to say, however listlessly, “All right.”
“Jane doesn’t like the idea either,” said Leo.
“Yes she does. She adores the idea. Don’t you, Jane?”
“Yes, Clovis.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“Dear me,” said Clovis, “are you having a migraine attack in the ears, now?”
Clovis sat cross-legged on the rug. A little dull pain went through and through me. I thought of the seance with Austin directly after I had seen Silver for the very first time.
“Jane,” said Clovis, “do come here and show Leo there’s really nothing to be afraid of.”
I got up and went over, and sat down. I looked at the cut-glass goblet. Leo had moved to the window. Clovis said to me, extra quietly, “Don’t ask me why, but push a bit, will you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I did say don’t—”
“Oh, hell,” said Leo. “All right.” He came over and sat down with us, running his hand over Clovis’s hair as he did so, and I saw Clovis wince.
We all put one finger on the glass. Inside me, the pain swelled on a long slow chord. But I had no urge to do anything about it, for there was nothing to be done. My eyes unfocused. I seemed to retreat inside myself, somewhere distant. I ignored the tiny voice which cried: If only this were the first time again. If only I could go back.
“Jesus Christ,” said Clovis, far away, but in a tone of abject awe, “it’s moving.”
No, I really couldn’t stay with Clovis anymore. I really couldn’t take any more of this sort of thing, this game. His dishonesty, this fear of his of being loved, of loving—