When Christiana was in the second or third grade, her teacher, a young woman as beautiful as Christiana herself was destined to become, asked the students one by one to describe their favorite animal. They were then to write according to their own descriptions a composition ill.u.s.trative of the dog, the horse, the fish, the bird, or whatever creature they had chosen. Each child rose in turn to discourse upon the object of his affection. No one was surprised when Amy Payson spoke about rabbits, and, without realizing it, rocked one in her arms. A shy little girl who never said anything above a hoa.r.s.e whisper told a tale of a dog who tried to climb a fence, entrancing her audience if only because they had to listen so closely to make out her barely audible rasp. Everyone was delighted when the rat boy of the cla.s.s recited spontaneously in verse a five-minute epic about his love for a pig."My pig it is so big, / Its ears are like silk, / It gives so much milk, / With hope and charity it is thick, / It takes care of us when we are sick, / It produces much leather, / Eats all the heather, / Runs. .h.i.ther and thither, / Wears a quiver," etc., etc. And he ended it,"Because I love him so much, / that I thrill to his touch."
And then there was the son of a swordfisherman, who chose the swordfish, and found himself almost paralyzed by his memories of itssuspended leaps, and of the courage it had as it fought, snapping its: entire length above the water like a spark, giving everything it had in its struggle to stay in the sea. He concluded that the swordfish had to love its life very much to fight so hard against being taken That in itself was enough for his essay, which, in the pure and a.s.sertive language of a child, touched upon the generative powers of memory and the definitions of courage.
The teacher was pleased with this exercise, and, as she listened to her children, she was eager for Christiana"s turn. She knew that Christiana loved animals, and she knew as well that the child was unusually contemplative. Though the hotel was rarely occupied, and had been failing since Christiana was born, and though this took it"s toll on her as she watched her father in defeat, it was not a tragedy for they were not greedy people, and they took their gradual impoverishment well. Christiana was a quick little girl, of deep imagination, and very pretty. But her strength was not derived from things that can be cataloged or reasonably discussed. She had an inexplicable lucidity, a power to see things for what they were. Somehow, she had come into possession of a pure standard. It was as if lightning had struck the ground in front of her and had been frozen and prolonged until she could see along its bright and transparent shaft all the way to its absolute source.
In the schoolroom with windows crowned by light, it was now Christiana"s turn. She glanced out the window and saw between its pillars the quick pa.s.sage of a white gull through whirling azure. Gone in a moment, it had crossed almost faster than she could see She stood to face the teacher. She had her favorite animal, an animal she loved, and she had intended to tell about it. But she found that just the thought of it, or the saying of a few words that would lead to a vision of it in the flesh, moving slowly with wondrous unheard-of stridesa"just her memory of the day when she had actually seer hima"brought her to the point where she had to cry.
Being practical, and not wanting to disrupt the cla.s.s, she quickly decided to talk about another animal, and started to tell about a sheep that was tied up on a small patch of lawn in front of the hotel. But she couldn"t. She couldn"ta"because for her the depth of things was always at hand, and because she had been made to think of theone event in her short life which had moved her the most. She failed utterly in her restraint, and suffered the embarra.s.sment of painful sobbing. For, try as she did, she was unable to think of anything but the white horse.
CHRISTIANA had been a.s.signed by her mother to bring back blueberries with which to make a pie and m.u.f.fins, but the real purpose of the trip was to walk among the many miles of heathered hills in June sunshine, solitary, free, and unenc.u.mbered but for a light wicker basket. At every turn or rise, she was privileged to see new viewsa"strips of cobalt blue water held in arms of beige sand, green chevrons of forest reaching for the sea, and the sun reflecting off the Sound into flat trajectories. It seemed that each time she blinked, a new glory of landscape appeared and was celebrated by the stiff breezes that pushed in the breakers and crowned the beach with panicked bracelets of foam. In the middle of the morning, when her basket was half full, she heard a crack of thunder in a cloudless sky, and looked beyond the rim of a cake-colored dune to see that something was falling. It left a trail of mist as it plunged into the ocean, like a meteorite dipped in smoke and gold. The birds rose from the bushes, chattering, straight up, the way they do when they hear a shot. And a red fox who had been skulking in the heather froze in his tracks, listening, and held his paw in the air lest putting it down would deprive him of his senses.
She dropped the basket and rushed to the top of the dune. Shielding her eyes, she looked seaward and saw a circle of white water rocking back and forth on the waves less than a quarter of a mile out. Something surfaced in the middle of the white disc, thrashing about in confusion. It wasn"t a fish (it had legs), and it telegraphed the cold, and perplexed fear of someone or something that was drowning.
Walking down the silky sides of the dune, her hand still shielding her eyes, Christiana was lost in consideration of what it was and what she should do. At the water"s violent edge (the surf was rough after a gale), she did what no adult would ever have done, except perhaps a strong young soldier recently returned from a war and convinced of his invulnerability. As she watched the thrashing beyond the breakers, she kicked off her shoes and unb.u.t.toned her dress, letting it fall to the sand precariously near the la.s.so mark of incoming waves. In a silken camisole nearly rose-colored from age and friction, she walked into the ocean, and when the turbulent foam was at her waist and the undertow made her stance uncertain, she dived headfirst into the freezing water and started swimming at the waves, sometimes going over their voluminous crests, and sometimes diving under them into what she had always called the "salt and pepper"-because the sound was so white, and, with her eyes closed, she saw only black. She was good in the waves, having grown up in their presence. Defeating their efforts to push her back, sideways, and under, she was soon swimming in blue water that she knew was very deep.
The ocean was surging to and fro in a rhythmic fashion a.n.a.lagous to the movement of a violin bow. It left her in windblown blue troughs as thick with whirlpools and eddies as a lake in August is thick with lilies, and it lifted her on solid mountains of water that bent into lenslike plates and then collapsed to become a dozen little flumes. From the high points, she could see all around, as if from an observation tower, and she saw that the current was pulling her sideways. She shifted course and continued swimming, until, almost exhausted by the cold waves, she came to the edge of the foam pool. In its center, a stricken animal was thrashing in panic.
Treading water, she looked at it carefully, and saw that it was a white horse twice as big as the draft animals that pulled ploughs in the potato fields, but with the lean look of a Southampton hunt horse. Though she had never seen either a cavalry mount or a battle, she knew from its motions that it thought it was in a fight. It was not drowning, but, rather, enmeshed in some sort of dream. Its front hooves left the water like leaping marlin, and smashed down into imagined opponents, cleaving the surface into angled geysers. It neighed the way horses do in a fight, in self-encouragement, and its legs never ceased flailing as it tried to trample down the brine.
If she were to approach it, she would surely be crushed, and if not, held in the vortex that it was slowly carving, and dragged under to drown. Even so, she swam into the ring.
The water there was far less substantial and less buoyant. Sometimes she went down in this rapids, and surfaced in a different quarter. But she kept swimming until she was literally upon hima"half floating, half resting on his broad back. She put her arms around his neck as far as she could (which was not very far), and closed her eyes in antic.i.p.ation of the detonation to come.
If the white horse had expected anything, it was not the sudden embrace of a young child in a silken camisole, and, unable to see what was on him, he went wild. First, he jumped out of the sea like a St. Botolph"s Charger, and seemed to fly in the air. Then, four legs extended, he went under, hoping to shed his rider in the gales of water that would sweep over his back. He went as deep as he could, and rolled, and kicked in the noiseless brine, but she, lungs dying, did not let go.
When he came to the surface she was with him, and, though he continued to thrash, he seemed now to want a rider. She had to be brought to land. She was a frail child with thin arms and wet hair that streamed over her face, and despite the fact that she had come all the way out there, mounted him, and hung on, she was shaking from the cold and seemed not to have the strength to engage once more the surf and its undertow. She touched his neck, urging him toward the beach, and he began to swim the way a horse swims when it fords a rivera"with complete concentration and single-mindedness.
On the back of the white horse, Christiana had the impression that he might easily have headed in the other direction and been able to spend the next few months at sea, like a polar bear. He seemed to have limitless power.
As they broke through the surf he began to go faster, as if he were waking up or getting his wind back. Momentarily confused by the undertow, he took several great strides which nearly threw his rider, and was soon standing on dry land. Not realizing how far she was from the ground, Christiana slid off and hit the sand so hard that she fell backward into a sitting position. It was difficult to believe that he was so high. But she could easily walk under his belly without bending her head. She weaved in and out of his legs, pa.s.sing her hand across them as if they were tree trunks. She walked through the forelegs, under his chin, and out to where he could see her. Except for his woundsa"the slashes and cuts, some of which stillbleda"he appeared to be a public monument come alive.
He tilted his head and looked at her in parental fashion, as if she were a colt or a filly. Then he lowered his neck and nuzzled her on her stomach, and then on her head, pushing her a little one way and back again, pressing her hair enough to make salt water come dripping out of it, and yet not hurting her at all. As long as he was looking at her, she could not turn away from his perfectly round, gentle eyes.
After she had run to get her clothes, and after she and the horse were made warm and dry by the wind and the sun, she saw him glance up and search the sky. He followed gulls wheeling on thermals miles aloft, but did not seem to find what he was looking for. Then, as she watched, he galloped up and down the beach; he pranced about in a circle; and, shaking out his mane, he reared onto his hind legs. Satisfied with this, he made a single leap that, to Christiana"s astonishment, took him over the high line of dunes which faced the ocean. By the time she followed, he had already taken to galloping and jumping in tremendous bounds over the duneland, the walls of scrub, and the ponds. She watched him during this exercise, wanting him to sail farther and farther at each jumpa"which he did. And he was not unaware of her, either, for he always stopped and looked back to see if she were still there. She was just young enough to clap each time he extended the distance of this soaring, and it made her own heart fly to see him rise into the air.
But finally he looked toward the dune where she was sitting, and raised his neck and head. Shaking them back and forth, he whinnied in the deep and beautiful way that horses can whinny when they are moved. Then he turned toward the sandflats and the Sound, and started his run. The earth shook, the beach gra.s.s trembled, he propelled himself forward, and he flew.
STATELY, plump Craig Binky often sat in an exhausted daze, staring at the flickering breaker light that reflected into the living room of the ill.u.s.trious East Hampton retreat which he called the "Rog and Gud Clug." His father, Lippincott "Bob" Binky, had built the club and opened it to all white gentiles of English descent. Nonetheless,the club members were not particularly fond of the founder"s son. They did not like the way he p.r.o.nounced things, his large entourage, the many senseless regulations that he proposed at their meetings (girls between ages nine and ten must wear waterwings at all times), or the blimp that he moored over the golf course. He called this blimp the Binkopede, and used it to cover funerals. As the deceased was being lowered into the earth, a blimp shadow would enshroud him, and the Ghost photographers would catch the mourners in the unusual pose of looking straight up.
Craig Binky and his friend Marcel Apand (a lecherous, candle-colored, rat-eyed real estate tyc.o.o.n, whose name was p.r.o.nounced "ape hand") believed that the job of the very wealthy, and therefore their job, was to find dazzling beaches and shaded groves humming with bees, to sit in a garden close as the trees swayed, and to watch the sea from well-kept summer houses as big as hotels. One afternoon, while a dozen waiters were laying out the cutlery and china of the Rod and Gun Club, Craig Binky and Marcel Apand were arguing over the former"s a.s.sertion that seven plus five was thirteen. Winding through crowds of sunburned men and women, the director of the club interrupted this mathematical dispute, calling his guests" attention to the lobsters that were boiling not so far away in large steam kettles full of sea water and fresh dill, and thena"antic.i.p.ation of dinner having banished the argumenta"proceeded to ask a favor of Craig Binky.
He knew that Craig Binky"s house in East Hampton had forty-five rooms, and that the double townhouse on Sutton Place had sixty, and he was aware of a great many other unused Binky habitations all over the worlda"a garden apartment in Kyoto, for example. He wanted to know if Craig Binky, or Marcel Apand for that matter, had an extra room to lend for a week or two. A young kitchen maid at the club needed someplace to stay in the city while she looked for a job. The club, of course, closed down promptly on the first of October. This year she had no place to live, because her father had died shortly after his old hotela"in the middle of the potato fields out toward Springsa"had burned down during a terrible electrical storm. Her mother had gone back to Denmark.
"I don"t know if I have room," Craig Binky blurted out, hiseyes darting from place to place the way they always did when people asked him for favors."Uh... the billiard room is being redone."
"Oh, that"s perfectly all right," the director said, rising."It doesn"t matter."
But Marcel Apand was listening intently."Wait a minute Craig," he said."Don"t you want to get a look at her?"
Not long after they got a look at her, she found herself on Marcel"s yacht, the Apand Victory. Moving through the ten thousand mothlike sails on the Sound, she felt as if she were riding on the shuttlec.o.c.k of a loom that was weaving a tapestry of summer. The trip to New York by boat took two days. They stopped for the night at Marcel Apand"s estate in Oyster Bay, where, in her estimation, he behaved strangely and was much too forward and direct about the kind of things that people on the tip of Long Island did not talk about in the presence of new acquaintances. But by the next day, the Fourth of July, she had generously forgiven his gracelessness, and the hot blue mist that covered the approaches to the city took up all her attention.
She had never been to New York. She had been told of its stunning size, and had made a few deductions of her own by contrasting the power and wealth of the city people with that of the islanders whom they annually overwhelmeda"but she hadn"t successfully guessed the half of it.
They sailed under the dozen bridges that spanned the Sound. Looking at them even from below gave her vertigo. From afar they were lovely arches and upright pillars. Like the moon and the sun, summer and winter, and all the many other things that she knew were in complementary balance, they suggested the existence of a greater and more perfect design. She could hardly believe that there were hundreds of these bridges, and their names were a delight to hear as the captain recited them for her along with the names of the rivers, channels, and bays they crossed.
At h.e.l.l Gate, when they came around the corner and saw the darkened cliffs of Manhattan, she learned that (as fine as villages may be) the world is infatuated with its cities. The view downriver into Kips Bay was crowded with unforgettable gray canyons, and there were bridges everywhere, knitting together the islands by leapingcurrents that ran as fast as racehorses. Their spidery metalwork soared, and their catenaries rolled like the swells off Amagansett.
LIKE a rusty, bashed-up harbor tug attached to a sleek new liner, Marcel towed Christiana from one party to another. He had her by his side, turning heads, at two dozen affairs a week. When they had left the yacht on the Fourth of July and taken a taxi through a mile and a half of canyon walls of blood-red brick and mirrored gla.s.s, they had seen three or four people where normally there would have been thousands. Because no windows were open and the air was so still and hot that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead. Had she driven in from Long Island, past the prairie full of tombs, the impression might have been strengthened. At Marcel"s parties, it was confirmed.
They were the price for living in a small palace with a garden that overlooked the East River. Most of the time, Christiana had the carefully decorated reception rooms, the libraries, whirlpools, saunas, and sunny balconies to herself. Marcel was almost always at his office, but when he returned he expected her to be waiting for him, ready to go out, fully made-up, dressed in expensive silks or in gowns covered with flashing scales.
At first, she looked for work, and would have been happy to have become a salesgirl at Woolworth"s or a cleaning woman in a bank. At the parties, benefits, and testimonial dinners, she was offered jobs as if they were the things that servants carried around on trays. Though these jobs paid enormous salaries, they demanded that she make herself available in the same way everyone a.s.sumed she did for Marcel.
The young men who caught her eye turned out to be either Aphand employees loyal to their chief, or voracious creatures not unlike him who always managed to ask her to call them in secret. And the men who put up the tents and hauled the food and dishes were different from the fishermen in Amagansett who did similar work in their spare time. They didn"t dare look at Christiana, and she was ashamed to look at them. It saddened her to remember whenshe had pa.s.sed out food to the Scandinavian families that came to the hotel when she was a girl, while a player piano banged out Danish songs from fifty years before, and she and the sunburned little blond boys blushed almost to ignition at the thought of dancing or touching.
On August nights, Christiana, Marcel, and his guests would occasionally sit on a balcony that extended over the river at the garden"s edge. Laden barges and intracoastal craft rode the current close to sh.o.r.e, pa.s.sing silently and swiftly like monsters trying to sneak down the channel after having wandered by accident into the city. These poor frightened things became targets for the Apand pistols. As the barges glided by, Marcel, Christiana, and their friends pumped shots into the darkness, trying to hit the running-lights, and when they shot low they heard their bullets chime off the steel hulls and into the water.
Sometimes when Christiana found herself at a party in a very high place she would go to a darkened window and look out over the city. It smoldered in summer heat, and through the blur she could see tenements burning, perhaps ten at any one time, in the city of the poor. The many lights that shone through the misty summer air also seemed to be fires, and everything below her appeared to be alight. And yet the city was not strangled in its own smoke. It was alive, and she wanted to know it, even if it meant the risk of losing herself within it. Because there were all kinds of h.e.l.la"some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
IN late summer the city was attacked and besieged by waves of heat which bleached and dried the marshes in New Jersey until they were as white as salt pans, scorched the pine barrens, and tried to turn the dunes of Montauk into the deserts of Mars. The city itself became a kilna"ninety-eight degrees in the shade and all through the night. The main arteries, islands, and boulevards were feathery green with thirsty trees that moved like wild dancers, begging for water in the dry wind.
One airless night at the end of August, Hardesty and Virginia became crazed with desire. Possessed and hallucinating, and sweating like athletes, they struggled with everything they had to get to the other side of one another. Immersed in violent, gymnastic, wet intercourse, they felt like powerful engines, forges, furnaces, and they wondered if perhaps some great G.o.d on a journey to the outer reach had flown by the sun and pa.s.sed his hot cloak over the earth. Just when it was over, they heard the steam whistle of an outbound freighter gliding downriver. They sensed the form of the ship; and its pa.s.sing gravity shook their bodies and trembled through them as if the ship were not making its way down the East River, alive in the stream, but sitting across from them in their bedroom.
Not too far away, Asbury Gunwillow lay on his bed, trying as best he could to breathe. He had found work as the pilot of The Sun"s launch. He carried reporters and ill.u.s.trators to pier fires and shipboard dedications; took them far out to sea to meet dignitaries on incoming transoceanic liners; ferried employees to and from Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights, and Sheepshead Bay; shadowed the Coast Guard, Customs Service, and Harbor Police; made it possible for the readers of The Sun to have fresh riverward perspectives of new buildings; accompanied Hardesty and Marko Chestnut to places like Sea Gate and Indian"s Mallow; and trolled for bluefish a hundred miles off the bight. He had been pursued for a full month by a monstrous unkempt woman from Tribeca, an intellectual who did not know if it were day or night, had never seen the ocean, and thought that a goat was a male sheep. Jaundiced and liver-colored, living only through books, tobacco, and alchohol, she had the face of a bullfrog, the brain of a gnat, and the body of a racc.o.o.n. And yet she had easily lured Asbury to her loft on Vesey Street, because she had a siren"s voice, and her name was Juliet Paradise. Being relatively courtly, he did not bolt at their first meeting, and she followed him thereafter like a hound."How can I get rid of her?" he had asked Hardesty and Marko."I look at her face, I see pizza pie. I"ve tried everything. What should I do? Tell me!" They just laughed, enjoying his distress.
Uptown, on Central Park West, Praeger and Jessica were back together again for the ninth or tenth time, knowing that they would spend the rest of their lives in convergence and reconvergence. Harry Penn, a widower, went to see his daughter when she appeared in aplay, ran the finest newspaper in the Western world, and was served his at-home dinners by Boonya, an insane but cheerful Norwegian maid. Marko Chestnut, also a widower, would never fall out of love with the woman who had died, and was sustained by the grace of the children who came to his studio to be painted, the practice of his art and the ever-changing city. Craig Binky was a bachelor who had never given a thought to love. But, then again, he hadn"t ever given a thought to anything else, either. He was happy enough. He had The Ghost, his blimp, and various schemes to crush The Sun. Marcel Apand had real estate, concubines, and Christiana for show.
On the August night when Asbury had been unable to sleep and Hardesty and Virginia could not tear themselves apart, Marcel Apand, some of his closest friends, and Christiana set out in three enormous automobiles to tour the city of the poor. Marcel was not a fool: the bulletproof salons on wheels in which they rode were equipped with radios and high-voltage skins, and each automobile carried both a guard and driver armed with small submachine guns and tear-gas grenades.
They did this because they were willing to do anything for amus.e.m.e.nt, because they, too, could not sleep, and because Marcel wanted to disabuse Christiana of the notion that beyond the brownout and smoke there was a free empyrean. He wanted to show her that such things did not exist, that there was no mystery, no transfiguration, no G.o.d to save those who are thrown upon the waves.
As they rode slowly in convoy across the Williamsburg Bridge, before curtains were drawn so no one would be able to see in, they toasted each other with champagne and checked the door locks. Nervous and excited, but, most of all, curious, they spoke in barely audible whispers as they descended the Brooklyn ramp into the inferno.
"The entire city is going to burn someday," said an older man, apart from Marcel the oldest there.
"So what if it does," someone else challenged."They probably have the right to burn it." The three cars had descended, and were moving down a long empty avenue of blackened tenements.
"I don"t mean the way it burns now, the way it burns every day," said the older man."That"s controllable, acceptable. I mean ashudder of anger that will make itself heard in heaven, a fire that will leave only rubble and gla.s.s."
"We"ll rebuild," said Marcel."Let it come. We"ll rebuild."
"It would be so wrong," a fashionable woman declared,"so very very wrong, to burn everything just to cleanse part of it...." But then she was interrupted.
"Look!" Christiana shouted. They peered out the windows on the right side, where a group of ten or twelve skinny young men in denim jackets and tight pants were chasing a man who wore no shirt. He tripped now and then, as they did, too, because they were running across a field of jagged bricks piled three or four deep at all angles. But, still, he nearly flew, and would have kept ahead of them had not a brick thrown by someone in the front of the pack grazed his head and sent him sprawling. They closed in, beating him with steel pipes and chains. Finally, as if that were not enough, they shot him point-blank in the face eight or ten times. Then they ran.
It had all happened in less than a minute. Christiana had not been able to breathe as she watched. She begged Marcel to call the police, and wanted to get out to help the man lying on the bricks.
The gla.s.s part.i.tion between compartments went down halfway, and the guard reported that the police had been summoned."But they won"t come," he said."Not until daylight. They"re afraid. It doesn"t matter: the man"s dead, and he probably was expecting it." The part.i.tion closed, and they rolled on.
"Don"t you own a lot of this area, Marcel?"
"I used to, Del, thirty years ago, when there was still something to own. It"s all squatter"s law now. And there aren"t many buildings that still stand."
"Enough to turn a profit."
"Only for the devil."
Through the tinted gla.s.s curtains came a fiery glow that made the women"s faces seem rose-colored. The long avenues of flattened rubble, in which nothing stood but chimneys, were only the perimeter of a vast city of the poor that stretched to the sea. Guarded by ramparts of tenements, it appeared in the distance like an enormous pan that holds a smoky flame. The sky above it flickered and danced, and the unseen rampart walls looked like a mountain ridge shadowedagainst a sunset. The action of the light suggested, in red and black the movements of a crazed barbaric army.
Though frightened into silence, they continued into the city of flame. This was no silent place, as well it might have been, punctuated only by explosions and shots. It was a h.e.l.l of roaring mechanistic sounds that fought to overwhelm the senses: battalions of drums, sirens mating in the open air, engines shrieking with delight Hundreds of thousands of people rushed from place to place just as in the mother city glowing coolly in the west, but these were wasted creatures with euphoric eyes. A soot-blackened man in rotted clothing bent over and pounded the sidewalk with two sticks. It appeared as if, momentarily, he would straighten his back, but he never did. Barefoot lunatics, expressions awash, staggered from street to street with their pants half down. Rows of diseased prost.i.tutes stood at the curbs and gestured to growling automobiles that had engines powerful enough for tanks and were filled with men whose hands warmed knives and guns. There were no quiet places, no misty parks, no lakes, no trees, no clean streets. The only towers in the city of the poor were pillars of wavering smoke, and it was ruled by arrogant young men who swept through the streets. Consumed by wars among themselves, they exploited others only as an afterthought, but always well. When the cars pa.s.sed by, these people pushed out their chests, gestured defiantly, and smiled. Rocks and bottles bounced off the armored automobiles like rain.
They came to a square which, though it had once been a fairground and a farmer"s market, had become a place for the exchange of loot and drugs, for the marshaling of gangs, and for the continuous sharking and hustling that was nothing less than the city consuming itself. Off to the side, a clever entrepreneur had made the ruined foundations of a public building into an arena. A crowd was pouring in through its gates and fighting for seats on planks laid over uneven courses of dilapidated masonry. Thousands had packed themselves together to see some kind of entertainment. Marcel thought it would be all right for his party to go in as well, since everyone"s attention would be directed toward what they had come to see. He sent a security man to arrange for a special box behind the lights and close to the waiting cars.
As they got out of the limousines, the women pushed back their lace veils and squinted at the carbon arc lamps that shone into the arena. The few stragglers who had gathered were silenced by the shocking differences in bearing, health, and dress that made both parties feel as if they were contemplating representatives of another species. Christiana threw back her hair and looked around. She knew that, if need be, she was able to climb or run. So often, living with Marcel, she had felt motionless, and, ironically, bodyless. Here, at least, everything was physicala"the noise, the oppressive summer heat, the tumbling pink clouds which reflected the flamelight. Better to be here, she thought, where the heart pounds out of control and the hand trembles, than chatting with Marcel"s friends in a drawing room or an expensive restaurant.
A man stepped into the lights. Wearing a lime-colored tuxedo and gold jewelry that seemed to be crawling all over him, he screamed in a language that Christiana could hardly understand, and, as he screamed, he danced. He gestured to one entrance or another of the pit, and a fighter would appear from the shadows. Armored in shiny black metal plates that made him look more like a sea creature than a gladiator, each man carried either a sword, a long steel pike, a trident, or a mace. When the man who was being devoured by his own jewelry disappeared, a dozen strong fighters remained standing on the sand. But they did not fight each other.
Instead, a gate opened and a brown mare was pushed into thelight. At first blinded, she shied back. The roar of the crowd was a wave that struck and paralyzed her, and, as her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the animal fighters closing in, and she knew what was going to happen. Those closest to her drove her from the wall to the center of their ring. She watched as they tightened it. There was little use in threatening with her hind quarters, since, wherever she turned, there would be a swordsman or a pikeman in front, where she was almost defenseless. Some animal fighters fought horses one on one. Not here. Even so, they moved very slowly, and the specta-tors were tense. The mare panicked, and reared onto her hind legs. As soon as she did, they attacked, driving their steel deep into her flesh. Pikes pierced her chest with a sound that was like a knife in a melon. She was down in an instant, swaying gently, on her knees, and they hacked at her until the sand was soaked and the pieces lay about like litter. Christiana could barely stay upright. She had the strength neither to stand nor to cry out, and though she wanted Marcel to take her out of there, she couldn"t even turn to him. She had no will, but only eyes, as in a dream.
They produced a different horse, and though Christiana begged in silence to be released, she was pinioned to the air, and she watched as another perplexed animal fell to its knees and died.
Then they brought out what the crowd had been waiting for, an enormous white stallion for whom both gates from the holding pen had to be opened. He stood calmly, neither blinded by the light nor afraid. The animal now in the ring was for Christiana the embodiment of all that she loved, all that was beautiful, and all that was good. She felt that were they to kill him they would be killing everything in the world that would someday enable it to rise. And unlike the day that she had been alone on the beach, thrown off her dress without a thought, and waded into the surf, she was now unable to go to his aid. It was a different time. Things had changed. The world was not the same as it had been when she had ridden the white horse in from the sea.
She was with him in the arc lights, and she saw through his eyes as he moved his head to survey his enemies. He stunned the crowd because he refused to be afraid. Striding forward easily, he went to the garbage that had been the mares, and put a hoof upon the b.l.o.o.d.y head of the first. It was an unmistakable gesture, and it made the horse butchers nervous. Christiana knew that he could have jumped out of the pit and left it all behind with no more difficulty than a steeplechase horse cavorting across a lawn. But he chose to stay. He began to move about. Never before had the animal fighters faced such a large creature. During his agile dancing, muscles rose in his flesh. His legs moved fast, and the gray hooves suddenly seemed as sharp as razors. The people screamed when he reared and made the invincible fighters lower their lances and swords in fright.
A lance was thrown. The rampant stallion turned on it furiously, knocking it aside and driving it into the ground halfway the length of its shaft. The man who had thrown it tried in vain to pullit from the sand. The spectators loved this, and they would have raised the roof, had there been one, when, next, two pikes were thrown at once. The horse leapt high in the air and let one pa.s.s, and kicked the other with his rear legs, sending it up into the night air on a flight that promised to take it far beyond the smoke and clouds.
Now everyone could hear his breathing. Quick jumps took him from one side of the pit to the other, scattering the swordsmen and spear-throwers, isolating them for his attacks. They bounced off the walls, dropped their weapons, and staggered about as if they didn"t know where they were. The white horse felled them one after another. He would fake to his left, and, in a split second, bound to the right, his forelegs crushing one of the horse butchers against the wall. He picked them up and shook them until they went limp, and then threw them away. He batted them with his neck and crushed them with his hooves. And in the end, he stood alone, shuddering, sweating, incensed.
Because the spectators had been worked up to a dangerous frenzy, Marcel insisted that his party leave immediately to drive back to Manhattan. When the three heavy cars took to the Great Bridge, they were raised far beyond the fiery haze, of the city of the poor, and Christiana saw a full moon that had sailed over the harbor and silvered the cliffs. Away from the city of the poor there were such things as the color blue, a cool wind that had no smoke, mats of interwoven summer starlight, and the enormous pearl of the moon. The expedition, Marcel said, was a great success. Who would have known that they would see a white horse fight like an avenging angel? Marcel was credited for the discovery, and the word was spread. But other caravans would have no luck, for the white horse was soon lost deep within the city of the poor.
They returned to Manhattan quite late, or, rather, early in the morning, and they all slept soundly. That is, all except Christiana, who did not sleep at all.
SHE stared out over the garden to the moon-washed river. While they had been in the city of the poor, a front of cold air had come down from Canada and lifted the mist from most of Manhattan.
Upriver, she imagined, it would be dark green again, rather than the diffuse jungle green of summer, in which there was no blue. Heat and haze had swallowed up the blue for weeks, but now it covered the surface of the rivers and dominated the mountainsides. The cool air shocked her into her senses.
She gathered her things together, changed into a chambray shirt and khaki pants, and went downstairs to the kitchen. There, she made half a dozen sandwiches of smoked meat, took some apples and carrots, and decided that she would steal from the petty cash jar. Marcel wouldn"t miss it, and she would take only what was there. She opened it and pulled out a roll of bills that she stuffed into her pocket without looking. Outside, on Sutton Place, in the middle of the night, she felt free for the first time in months, and she almost danced down the street. She had no idea where she was headed or what she would do, but, before she turned into the depths of the city, she counted the money she had taken and was a little shocked to see that it came to $3, 243. Since that was barely enough to make a small lunch for Marcel"s closest friends, or to provision the yacht for a day sail, she rightly a.s.sumed that he would never know or care that it was gone. After all, this was the man who had lost $7 million at Pac.h.i.n.ko, and said it was worth having seen the little silver b.a.l.l.s fall past the little silver pins.
Purely by chance, she headed south to the Village. The city was empty, its only activity the blinking on and off of neon signs, an occasional plume of steam that rose from the street, or a gull that gently crossed the gap between the canyons, gliding on air that was pink with dawn and equanimity. Everything seemed benevolent. But, still, she was apprehensive. Marcel had said that she would be devoured immediately by the hard city outside."You"ve never lived alone," he said."It"s not easy. How will you find an apartment. Where? Do you know how difficult it is to obtain an apartment in New York? And a job: it might take months to get a job. Meanwhile, you"ll starve on the street."
Early in the morning, a real estate agent showed her a tiny chamber on Bank Street, which he called an apartment. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and she could touch all four walls of the "bedroom" from one spot, but it was clean and it was quiet, and it overlooked a garden."You"ll have to share the balcony with the gentleman who lives in the adjoining residence. He works for The Sun, piloting their launch, so he"s always out when the weather"s good, and you"ll have the balcony to yourself."
"But it"s only a foot wide," Christiana protested."Two hundred dollars a month," the real estate agent answered. She signed the lease, put down a security deposit and a month"s rent, and the real estate agent left."Bang!" said Christiana."Just like that, and I"ve got a place to live!" She opened a bank account, stocked the refrigerator, and furnished the place, all before noon. Since she needed only a small table, two chairs, a white sleeping mat, some blankets, a pillow, three lamps, an old prayer rug, and a minimum of kitchen equipment for her minimum of a kitchen, she was left with more than $2, 000a"and some pocket money with which she bought lunch, a Danish dictionary, several Danish novels and geography books, a notebook, and some pens. She was going to teach herself the language that she had first known and that still lay dormant within her needing only to be awakened. By three o"clock that afternoon, she had found a job.
At the service entrance of a beautiful house in Chelsea, a most astonishing-looking ageless woman named Boonya took her inside and began to explain the duties of an occasional maid."But I said full-time," Christiana protested."Mr. Penn pays you for full-time, dear," said Boonya, who was as round as a medicine ball,"but you only work part-time. In the interbules, you"re supposed to go to liberries and concerps. If you go to college, he"ll pay your tut.i.tion. Me, I prefer to work around the house, to cook and do the washtub and stuff. But each is different. Bosca, the dark girl, who was here until she left, was studying in the theater. Do you see what I mean?" Yes. Extraordinary."
If that"s how you want to put it. All right, can you cook?" I used to cook in my parents" hotel."
Good," said Boonya, as she led Christiana to the kitchen."But you may not be familiar with the foods that Harry Penn holds dear to his heart. He and his daughter have favorites, which I"ll teach you how to make."
"Like what?"
"Oh, durbo cheese stuffed with trefoil, camminog, meat of the vibola, roast bandribrolog seeds, satcha oil hotcakes, young Dollit chicken in Sauce Donald, giant broom berries, creme de la berkish tollick, serbine of vellit, pickled teetingle, chocolate wall herrnans trail lemons, Rhinebeck hot pots with fresh armando, parrifoo of aminule, vanilla lens arrows, fertile beaties, archb.e.s.t.i.a.l bloodwurst Turkish calendar cake, fried berlac chippings, c.o.c.ktail of ballroom pig, vellum cream cake, undercurrents, crisp of tough boxer lamb sugared action terries, merry rubint nuts, and rasta blood-chicken with sauce Arnold."
For each of these products of Boonya"s crazed imagination, she had a recipe. Christiana looked on in wonder as Boonya pantomimed the preparation of fresh teetingle, or the proper way to cut vanilla lens arrows."Always flour the marble before you put down an uncooked lens arrow. Sprinkle the vanilla. Cut it fast!" she screamed, her fat sausagelike arms flailing about the medicine ball."Otherwise, it sticks. Sticky little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, lens arrows. Did your mother ever teach you how to properly bone a good serbine of vellit?"
Boonya took her through the house, which was filled with books, paintings, and nautical relics, all of which required regular dusting. There was an illuminated painting of Harry Penn as a regimental commander in the Great War."That was years ago," Boonya explained,"ages and ages ago. He"s a young man there, but not now. Now he"s old. He spends a lot of time at The Sun, but when he"s here, he"s always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he"s crazy. (I put a book right next to my alarm clock, and the clock kept on going.) Don"t tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes. Mum"s the word."
"I suppose it"s because his wife"s dead," said Christiana, * that he dances with a broom."
"I don"t think so," said Boonya."He dances with a mop, too.
"Maybe he had a mistress."
"He did, but she had short hairs. I also got short-haired mops. They"re for precision cleaning, like those small wheels they got in racing cars. In them European formula P"s, the wheel"s the size of asilver dollar. That"s why they have midget racers, who can grab it in their tiny hands." She looked around in conspiratorial fashion and beckoned Christiana toward her. Whispering softly, she said,"Their little bodies fit between the struts. My cousin Louis tried to be one. He"s small enough, Lord knows. But Louis always pretends to be a shadow turkey, so they threw him out."
"What"s a shadow turkey?"
"That"s one of those things that boomatooqs use to wash windows with, but they"re illegal in New York and New Jersey, so Connecticut boomatooqs have to smuggle them through to get to Pennsylvania. Get my drift? Louis wasn"t all there. One day, the Lord was cracking nuts, and Louis was taking a nap in the nut pile. Get it?"
Christiana smiled, but, when Boonya looked away for an instant, duplicitously rolled her eyes.
"Shh!" hissed Boonya, holding her finger up in the air."Do you hear castanets?"
"No," Christiana answered.
"I think I hear them pa.s.sing on a funeral wagon. Maybe the Spanish amba.s.sador kicked the bucket." And then, with drops of sweat dripping from the unified eyebrow that marched across her forehead like a centipede, Boonya gradually stoked the fire of her madness until she intoned like a druid, singing to Christiana what she said were her ten favorite Egyptian Christmas carols, delivering a long and intense dissertation on Eskimo s.e.xual utensils, and talking about the coconut, which she maintained was exclusively the symbol of military preparedness. She would stop to quiz Christiana.
"What"s the symbol of military preparedness?"
"The coconut."
"Exclusively?"
"So it is said."
But all in all, Boonya was a good maid and (in her work, at least) as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar. And she looked like it too, or, rather, like a sphere with three melons on ita"two enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s that swayed with gravity, and a head upon which were coils I thin blond hair wound in basket-weave. She was Norwegian, and thought she was superior to the slim and beautiful Christiana, whowas Danish, because Norway was above Denmark.