The Cannibal Heart

16

The box lay unopened on the bureau where once Miss Lewis had kept her talcum and unscented cologne and her sterile combs and brushes.

Mrs. Wakefield knew what was inside the box, and she felt no anger at Luisa, only at herself for making an error in judgment. Poor Luisa, she thought. After I leave I’ll send the necklace back to her. Perhaps it will be a lesson to her.

It was two o’clock and she was beginning to feel hungry. She had gone without lunch, partly in order to finish the inventory, and partly to avoid seeing Mark with his family. There was no chance to see him alone, even to say goodbye. Evelyn swept through the house like a wind, penetrating every corner. She dusted and mopped and aired the blankets, singing as she worked, so that there was hardly a moment during the morning that Mrs. Wakefield hadn’t heard her voice, or her steps crossing and re-crossing the hall like a patrol.

She packed the notebook, now nearly half-filled, in her suitcase, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Mr. Roma was at the sink washing his hands and forearms with a piece of the rocklike soap that he and Carmelita made themselves.

“It is very hot,” he said, “considering the morning fog.”

Considering the morning fog that should never have lifted. “I haven’t eaten. I thought I’d make myself a sandwich.”

“There’s no chicken paste, the kind you like.”

“That’s all right.”

“If you wanted to wait, though, Mr. Banner could get you some. He is going into town for a haircut.”

“When?”

“Very soon, I think.”

“Are you going with him?”

“Not today. The pump isn’t working so good, I have to see what is the matter.”

“I’ll ask Mrs. Banner to get the chicken paste,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “She’s more likely to remember.”

“Mrs. Banner is not going either. The jeep is too rough for her.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell him to get some then?”

“If it’s convenient. I don’t want to put him to any trouble.” She paused at the door and said over her shoulder, “I finished the inventory. I think I’ll go for a walk.”

“A good idea.”

“It will be my last walk here,” she said with a smile he couldn’t understand. “I want to remember every minute of it.”

When she went out she saw that the garage hadn’t been opened yet, and she knew that if she hurried she would be able to cut through the woods and reach the road in time.

James, the gander, sauntered over with his contemptuous greeting. She passed him without speaking. He was not accustomed to being ignored by people, and he followed her, hissing, and moving his neck back and forth in outrage. The faster she walked, the faster he waddled along behind her, using his powerful wings to gain speed.

She was amused, at first, by the pursuit. But as it was prolonged, past the garage and the cypress windbreak, she began to wonder how far he intended to follow her, and whether his hissing had attracted the attention of the people in the house. She didn’t want anyone to know where she was going, and the gander’s hissing seemed to point to her and to her destination like a malicious accusing whisper.

She knew how absurd she must look, racing against time and an obstinate gander. He had never before followed her beyond the garage, and she wondered what perverse devils were driving him.

She stopped, and looked back at him with hatred.

“Go away, James. Go back. Go back now.”

She tried to sound patient, in spite of her hurry, but the gander wasn’t fooled. He circled her, clockwise, his blind eye, ringed with orange, glowing like an opal. In his male arrogance he thought she was a victim, and when she started on her way again he shortened the distance between them. The flap of his wings frightened the birds. The meadow larks fled to the tree tops and the jays cursed him from the shelter of the leaves.

At the pepper tree where the path curved toward the bridge, she stopped for the second time. Leaning over she picked up a handful of dirt and hurled it at the gander. The dirt hit him square in the face.

He raised his orange beak and honked. The noise was like an earthquake of sound, shaking the trees and splitting the air. Every living thing in the woods responded to the trumpet of war. The lizards streaked for cover. The myopic gophers who had come up to nibble the roots of devil grass, scuttled back into their catacombs, their ears bursting with danger. Every tree quivered with angry birds in ambush.

She waved her arms and shouted. The gander worked the ground with his feet, and raising his bill, trumpeted again.

She couldn’t quiet him and she couldn’t outrun him. She stood, in despair, expecting that at any moment Luisa or Jessie or someone from the house would come running to investigate the noise. By the time it was explained it would be too late, Mark would already have passed the place on the road where she intended to meet him. It seemed that the whole of nature was in league against her: the morning fog that should never have lifted, the bright day that hid nothing, the tattling birds; everything — time, and the weather, and Mark himself, and the gander’s trumpet summoning more of her enemies from the house.

She reached down and picked up a stone.

“Go back,” she said, as if the gander was not an animal but a bewitched human who could understand her words. “I warn you, go back.”

He honked again, beating his wings powerfully. But he didn’t look fierce; instead, he seemed curious, as if he had never before witnessed such strange behavior and was trying his best to do his part in the pantomime. He had known this silly woman for years; she had fed and watered him and stroked his feathers and chased him away from the chickens; if she wanted now to play a new game, he was willing. He leaped into the air in his excitement and listened to the full satisfying sounds that came from his own throat.

The stone hit him just over his opal eye.

He fell gracefully on his side. His opal eye remained unchanged, but almost immediately a glaze came over the other eye. His legs stuck out from his body, stiff as boards.

He lay among the leaves, looking smaller than he had when he was alive. She came over and spoke his name, “James?” She felt among his feathers for the beat of his heart. There was no blood, no evidence at all to show that the stone had hit him except his instantaneous excretion at the moment of death.

She would have liked to run away and leave him lying where he was; someone would find him and assume he had died naturally, of old age. But she was afraid that the finder might be Jessie. Jessie didn’t understand that death could come to her friends.

She decided to carry him further away from the path and cover him with fallen leaves and branches. There was no way to take hold of him except by his legs. The yellow skin felt like the skin of an old man, dry and cracked. She picked him up very carefully, so the oozing excrement wouldn’t soil her dress. He was surprisingly light. His fierce wings and huge body had almost made her forget that he was only a bird, after all; the body was merely fat and feathers, and the bones were like twigs.

Fifty feet from the path there was a small hollow under a eucalyptus tree, which shed its leaves and bark continually. No matter how often the wind swept them away, the ground was constantly littered with chips and chunks of bark. The trunk of the tree, where the bark had already been shed, was as grey and smooth as old bones.

She placed the gander in the hollow and covered him with dried leaves and pieces of bark. His drab feathers were easily camouflaged. When she returned to the path and looked back, she couldn’t even see the place where she’d buried him. No one would ever find him. He would lie there until he became part of the earth itself as Billy had become part of the sea. Not death, she thought, only change. Change, quick and violent and startling, like a hand grabbing you from behind in the dark. It took time to adjust and to realize that, though its pressure was relentless, the hand itself was friendly. Only change, nothing is wasted.

She wasn’t immediately sorry that she’d killed the gander. Like Billy, like the starfish, it had had no future but death, and that death should have come at her hand (the friendly hand in the dark), wasn’t important. She was merely an instrument in the cycle of change. The gander had escaped disease, and the roasting pan, and the wheels of cars, only to die by a stone over his opal eye.

She crossed the barranca, picking her way among the boulders, pursued only by her own squat black shadow that hid behind the trees and jumped out at her again in the clearing where the swimming pool was, and the old well, gone to salt. A hundred yards beyond, she reached the fence where once a year Mr. Roma posted new No Trespassing signs to replace the ones that had been bleached by the sun or shredded by the wind or turned into a soggy pulp by the sea fogs. She lifted the bottom wire of the barbed-wire fence and crawled underneath. One of the barbs caught the hem of her dress but she jerked free, leaving behind strands of green silk for some enterprising nuthatch to use to decorate his nest.

She sat down by the side of the road, breathing hard and feeling quite faint from the heat.

It was fifteen minutes before she heard the jeep coming along the road. All her worry and haste, the gander’s death, the crude burial, had been for nothing. She looked down at the friendly hands that had moved too fast.

It can’t have happened, she thought. When I get back James will be standing under the magnolia tree.

The jeep came around the curve trailing a cloud of dust.

She stood up, conscious suddenly of the way she would look to him — a woman no longer young, her face flushed and moist, her dress snagged, and her white shoes dappled with dirt. Nervously she smoothed her hair back and wiped off her forehead with a handkerchief.

He pulled up alongside the road.

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you. I thought I’d — drive into town with you.”

“You think that’s a good idea, do you?”

He was wearing sun glasses, the kind that covered the eyes entirely even at the corners. She couldn’t tell what his expression was, though he sounded cool.

“I couldn’t think of any other way,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

“The more we talk, the further in we get.”

“There are some things I’ve got to tell you. If I don’t, Luisa or someone else will, and I’d rather tell you myself so you’ll hear it straight.”

“What if I don’t want to listen?”

“You’ve got to, Mark,” she said helplessly. “You’ve got to.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as if they hurt. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“I’ll be gone tomorrow. Then you can forget about me.”

“Christ,” he said, and got out of the jeep and came around to her side. “All right. Talk. Tell me.”

“Here, like this? Can’t we even go somewhere and sit down? Look — we could walk over there.” She pointed south, to a field of wild mustard, blazing with yellow blooms. “Isn’t it pretty, Mark?”

“I guess.”

“Oh, it is pretty. I wonder who decides which are weeds and which are flowers. Did you ever see the wild morning glories growing by the shed? They look so delicate, it’s rather a shock when you find out how deep and tough their roots are.”

“Is that what you wanted to tell me about, weeds?”

“Give me time.”

They crossed the road, side by side, but a yard apart. The field of wild mustard wasn’t fenced. The blooms came up to their knees.

“It’s not a very good place to sit,” he said. “There are too many bees.”

“Don’t you like bees?”

“Not especially.”

“They don’t sting unless they’re frightened.”

“So I’ve heard.” He had the same feeling that he’d experienced yesterday on the boat, that everything she said was meant to have personal and philosophic implications. Her conversational asides (the dugong and its child, the storm a thousand miles away, the old man who’d planted the trees) — these were not merely observations. They were analogies, perhaps unconscious, perhaps deliberate. And now there were more of them, the bees that wouldn’t sting unless they were disturbed, and the delicate morning glories with the tough roots. After only three days, even the weather wore her monogram.

He stamped down the mustard with his feet until there was a space big enough for them both to sit down. On a hillside half a mile away, two horses were grazing.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said, watching the horses on the scarred hill. “Someone beat you to it by half an hour.”

“Who?”

“Evelyn.”

“What did she tell you?”

“The straight stuff, I suppose. You had a mentally defective son, and your husband apparently killed himself.”

“Why... why apparently?”

“It was never proved, was it? He could even have been murdered.”

“But there was no one to murder him.”

“Not even you?”

“Why,” she whispered, “why do you say such things to me?”

“They’re what I’m thinking.”

She covered her face with her hands. “Such ugly things. You’ve got no right.”

“The whole business is ugly, including the way you’ve tried to cover up, lie, bribe.”

“I had nothing to cover up. Only my pride.”

“Janet...”

“That first night, the way you looked at me — as if I was a real woman, not just the mother of an idiot, the widow of a suicide. I couldn’t bear to have you find out. But you wouldn’t understand. You’re too hard to feel any pity.”

“Am I?” he said bleakly.

“You have no heart. You must always figure things out, put them into words.”

“They have to be put into words. Janet, why did he kill himself?”

She didn’t raise her head. He pulled her hands gently away from her face so that she couldn’t hide, she had to look at him.

“Why?” he repeated.

“I don’t know. He was tired, I guess. You know that deep and terrible tiredness that carries on day after day as if you’ve never been to bed...”

“Janet! For God’s sake don’t romanticize it. ‘That deep and terrible tiredness’ — that sounds fine, but what in hell does it mean? Come off it. We’re talking about a man now, a real human being. You insult his intelligence, and mine, too, by this pretty violin obbligato about tiredness. Other people get tired. When they do, they yawn, turn off the lights and go to bed. Oh, Christ, what’s the use of talking to you?”

“Don’t talk then, Mark.”

“You’re like all the other romantics, the Shelleyans, the members of the ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep’ school. I don’t care whose brother Death is. I only know it’s something to be avoided as long as possible, not something to dress up fancy and fall in love with, the way you’ve done. It’s an obsession with you, totally unrelated to fact or observation. Now try again, Janet. Why did he kill himself?”

“I told you...”

“Sure. He was tired.”

“You’re so cruel. Why do you want to hurt me?”

“I don’t.” A cruising bee grazed his cheek and he slapped at it impatiently. “I’m trying to save myself.”

“What from?”

“You. The branding iron.”

“I hate it when you talk like that. It’s untrue.”

He looked angry, but in a kind of melancholy way, as if the anger was only a surface substitute for another emotion. “Your memory’s short. Don’t you remember what you said to me this morning — that you’d rather kill me than go away from here and leave me with my family?”

“I didn’t really mean it.”

“Didn’t you? It fits in nicely. You’d like to see me dead. Not a mangled corpse, of course. That might cramp your obsession. But something neatly preserved, like the starfish you fixed for Jessie yesterday. You’d have a whale of a time in Madame Tussaud’s, Janet. All the pretty corpses with wax guts and wax blood.”

An airplane flew overhead, a swift silver fish in the sea of sky.

“I thought you liked me,” she said, incredulous. “I didn’t know you were thinking such terrible things about me. I wouldn’t have come here. I wouldn’t have—” thrown the stone that killed the gander, dead under the eucalyptus tree.

He said with an ugly smile, “Tell me, how did he kill himself?”

“He fell over the cliff.”

“He flung himself over, you mean?”

“I don’t know which. I wasn’t there. How could I know? He just went out one night and didn’t come back.”

“Didn’t you suspect his intention?”

“I... yes. He had tried once before.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Nothing. There wasn’t anything I could do.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to.” He was appalled by his own sadism, but he couldn’t hold the words back. They were a defense, his only defense against the knowledge that he had fallen in love with her. “Tell me, what was your reaction when you found out he was dead? That he was better off, out of this cold cruel world? How many euphemisms occurred to your Shelleyan mind?”

“Stop it,” she cried. “You’ve got no right to mock me like this and pry into my affairs.”

“I have a right to know what happened to your husband and why. You gave it to me by nominating me to take his place.”

“You make everything sound dirty and cheap.”

“I have to. You’ve been gorging yourself on euphemisms so long, you need an emetic. The main trouble with euphemism is that it’s habit-forming. You get so accustomed to disguising things that you lose track of what’s under which disguise.”

“I don’t understand some of the things you’re saying. I only know you hate me... you hate me...”

She flung herself down in the weeds, beating the ground with her fists.

“Janet, stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I don’t care!”

He reached over and held her wrists together. “Stop now. Everything’s all right.”

With a little cry she turned and pressed her mouth against the back of his hand. “Mark — say you didn’t mean any of it.”

“I didn’t mean any of it.”

“I’ve never loved anyone before like this.”

“Don’t talk, darling.”

The wind had risen, and the wild mustard bobbed and curtsied as it passed. In the east, beyond the hill where the two horses were grazing, a bank of clouds had formed.

Her hair, blowing against his cheek, smelled of sun and brine.

“Everything looks beautiful to me now,” she said. “Does it to you, too, Mark?”

“Even the ants?” he said, brushing one from her temple.

“Even the ants. Everything.”

She had taken off her shoes. Her feet were large but perfect, the skin smooth all over, as if it had never felt the pressure of a shoe.

He spanned her ankle with one hand. “You have big feet.”

“Haven’t I though? Swimmer’s feet.”

“You like the water, don’t you?”

“Especially the sea. Do you know, I never saw the sea until I was grown up, and yet, when I saw it for the first time, I felt that I must have been born beside it. I recognized it — isn’t that odd? — I recognized it the way people sometimes recognize a house they lived in when they were children. It was more than recognition, though. I felt a sense of destiny. I remember thinking, here is my fate, here is the explanation, this is where I was born.”

The return of the amphibians, he thought again, the inverse evolution, the slow way to extinction. He said, “You’re a throwback, Janet. A mutation. What does the sea explain to you?”

“Everything,” she said. “Everything but love. The whole hideous and intricate scheme of life and death is in the sea, but not love.”

He glanced down at her and thought, fleetingly, that there was some wild justice in the fact that she had borne a child who was a mutation. He wondered how many Billys would follow the atomic war. The bomb had heralded the era of outrage, and perhaps the whole human race had already started its slow migration back to the sea. She was, then, not a throwback but a forerunner, carrying in her womb the maculate egg, the imperfect gene that doomed the world.

She sensed his withdrawal, and tried to call him back. “Don’t start thinking again, will you? Don’t start trying to talk me out of your life. I’m in it. You can’t evict me with words.” She clung to his arm, as if he had made an almost imperceptible motion to rise and walk away. “I’ll tell you everything, Mark, everything you want to know about me. After what’s happened I couldn’t have any secrets from you. I want to open my whole life to you.”

“Better not. You feel a little submissive now, but it won’t last.” He took her hand, and closing the fingers one by one, made it into a fist. “Hang onto your secrets. Keep them all cozy in here for another twenty-four hours and you’ll be safe. Maybe no one else will ever come so close to figuring you out.”

“You’re awfully vain.”

“You intend to destroy me,” he said. “I couldn’t be more certain of it if you had a gun in your hand.”

“Why don’t you run away, then?”

“I can’t. I’m stuck, like the remora, the fish that lives by attaching itself to the belly of a shark. You like analogies. How do you like that one?”

“It’s very interesting.”

“I think so, too. The remora is, naturally, safe from the shark as long as it’s attached to the belly. On the other hand the shark isn’t always safe from the remora because fishermen use it sometimes for bait. They tie up the remora alive, and throw it overboard, and off it goes looking for a shark’s belly. In spite of its small size the remora applies enough suction to pull in the shark.” He added, “We published a book on fishing once. That’s the only thing I remember about it, because it made me wonder how you go about catching a live and unattached remora. Have you any ideas on the subject?”

“No.”

“You might ask the sea for an explanation.”

“Damn your irony,” she said, “and your two-bit horoscopes. Damn everything about you!”

“With one slight exception which shall remain unnamed?”

“Damn you, damn you.” She hid her face against his shoulder, weeping. But the tears came only from her eyes, they did not moisten her dry heart.

He made no attempt to comfort her. When she finally raised her head she saw that he wasn’t even looking at her. He was watching the horses on the hillside. Excited by the rising wind, they raced downhill and kicked up dust.

Turning, he saw her resentment.

“I like horses,” he said. “Don’t you? Not in the third-at-Pimlico sense, simply to look at.”

“I don’t want to discuss horses.”

“Very well. Anything you say.”

She knew that he was ready to leave. Leaning against his arm she could feel its tenseness.

“Mark, don’t go yet. Please.”

“I have to. There are a few amenities to be observed. I said I was going into town for a haircut. It was the truth, too. I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Are you glad now that you did? You’re glad I came?”

“Glad! Christ!”

“You’re sorry then.”

“Both,” he said. “A bushel of both.”

“Mark. Darling. I’ll see you again, won’t I? Promise me. Say it.”

He shook his head, looking bleakly out toward the sea. “I don’t know.”

She sat where she was, in the trampled weeds, until she heard the jeep go down the road. Then slowly she began putting on her shoes.

The horses had gone back to the top of the hill again. She thought about Mark, and about the man who owned the horses. He was a deputy sheriff named Bracken, and she had first met him a year ago, the night John was found at the bottom of the cliff.