The Dogs of Babel

TEN

Back in Disney World, back among the nightly fireworks and the children in mouse-eared hats, Lexy and I walk hand in hand forever. I sometimes think that if I could, I would round up all of the people who visited the park during the days we were there, and I would ask them to show me their photos and videotapes, just on the chance that one of them might have caught us on film. I feel certain, looking back, that we must have walked through someone’s family grouping at the exact moment the shutter closed; surely, some father wielding a video camera must have captured us somewhere, climbing into a teacup or reading the gravestones outside the Haunted Mansion, while his children, fidgety and drunk with excitement, ran around people’s legs in the foreground. What would I give for that, to see how we looked, the two of us together, when we had known each other barely a week? Me in my Eeyore shirt, and Lexy with the sun in her hair. Everything. I would give everything.

We stayed in Orlando for four days. We arrived on a Sunday afternoon and didn’t turn back for home until Thursday morning. And all the time, we ate nothing but appetizers. Appetizers, snacks, and side dishes. We didn’t eat a meal until Friday night, when, almost home, we stopped again at the same Italian restaurant we had gone to the day of the wedding. We ate a big dinner, with entrées and desserts, wine and coffee, and then I dropped Lexy at her house and went home to grade my papers in an exuberant, generous mood. That was the end of our first date.

I haven’t mentioned sleeping arrangements yet; I haven’t told you how we slept in the same tiny motel room for four humid Florida nights, and how it wasn’t until our last night there that Lexy crossed the room and came into my bed. How she whispered to me, “I don’t usually do this on the first date” as she ran her hands over my long-forsaken body. I mention these things, the warm air and cool sheets, the fresh joy of Lexy lying beside me, in the interest of not skipping over anything that might prove to be important. But in truth, they are not things I can speak of very easily. I touched her and it felt like coming home. What more is there to say?

On Sunday afternoon, two days after our return, I arrived at Lexy’s house with flowers and a chew toy for Lorelei. The flowers, the first I ever gave her, were dahlias, so dark and red they were almost black.

“Wow,” Lexy said as she took them from me. “These are gorgeous. I’ve never seen flowers this color. They kind of remind me of the devil.”

“The devil?” I said. “Yes, that’s exactly what I was going for. It’s a test, to see if you’re receptive to the black arts. Now I can introduce you to the other members of the coven.”

She laughed. “No, don’t you see what I mean? They’re this deep bloodred color, and they’ve got these kind of seductive honeycomb petals that just draw you in further and further.” She waited a moment and then added grandly, “I believe I shall carry these flowers at my wedding.”

I only paused for a moment. “Well,” I said, “you’d better get married quickly. These are only going to last a day or two.”

She laughed and put her arms around me. “Oh, I don’t think you’re going to get off that easily,” she said. “But see what I mean about these flowers? They seduced me into asking you to marry me on our second date. I think we’d better put them in the other room before I lose control completely.”

“Oh, let’s keep them here and see what happens,” I said, and pulled her down with me onto the couch.

Later that afternoon, she took me to see her basement workshop, the place where she made her masks. There was a large table in the center of the room, covered with an untidy litter of newspapers and jars of paint. Unfinished faces, bare and ghostly, were stacked in piles on the floor. Everything was coated with a fine white dust. I remembered the mask I had worn at the wedding.

“I meant to ask you,” I said. “What does that mean, ‘You have taken the finest knight in all my company’? Is it from something?”

“It’s from ‘Tam Lin,’” she said. “Do you know that story?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s from an old Scottish poem, but I first heard it as a fairy tale. There was a version of it on this record I used to have when I was a kid—I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, and I’d listen to these records of people reading stories, kind of like books on tape. It was always these washed-up actors doing the reading, people I’d never heard of but later saw on TV in old movies and stuff. Anyway, I loved this one. It’s the story of a woman named Janet who falls in love with a knight named Tam Lin, who’s been abducted by the fairy queen or the elf queen or something, and Janet has to rescue him and steal him back to the mortal world. She goes and waits for him in the woods at midnight on Halloween, and all the fairies ride by on horses, and Janet has to pull Tam Lin down from his horse and hold on to him while the fairy queen turns him into all kinds of horrible things—she turns him into a snake, and a snarling beast, and a red-hot bar of iron, but Janet has to hold on as tight as she can, until finally he turns into a ‘mother-naked man’—isn’t that a nice phrase, ‘a mother-naked man’?—and then he’s hers forever.”

“So she’s standing in the woods at midnight with a naked man in her arms? And this was a children’s story?”

Lexy laughed. “That’s nothing,” she said. “When I was in college, I went and found an early version of the poem, and it turns out that Janet was pregnant. That’s something they left out of the kids’ version.”

“So what about the ‘finest knight in all my company’ stuff?”

“Oh, that’s the best part. After Janet rescues him, and everything’s okay, the fairy queen throws a fit. The way it went in my version was, Out then spoke the fairy queen, and an angry queen was she: ‘You have taken the finest knight in all my company.’ And then there’s this scary part that I found absolutely thrilling, where the fairy queen says to Tam Lin, ‘Had I known but yesterday what I know today, I’d have taken out your two grey eyes and put in eyes of clay. And had I known but yesterday you’d be no more my own, I’d have taken out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone.’ It still gives me goose bumps.”

“Lighthearted little story,” I said. “I can see why that would stick in your mind.”

She sank down onto a long, beat-up couch that ran along one wall. I sat down next to her. There was a series of soft thuds from the staircase as Lorelei loped down to join us. She came over to the couch and jumped up, insinuating her large, dense body into the small space between us.

“Can I help you?” I said to the dog as she wedged herself against my knees. Lexy stroked Lorelei, looking thoughtful.

“The thing is,” she said, “I always identified with the fairy queen.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe Janet was too goody-goody for me.

“Except for the getting knocked up part.”

She smiled. “Except for that.” She was quiet for a moment. “No, I guess I kind of identified with her anger. You know, she gets so mad, and it’s presented like she’s behaving totally inappropriately, but I can understand her point of view.”

I considered it. “Absolutely,” I said. “She’s just doing her thing, being the fairy queen, and Janet comes along and steals away her finest knight.”

“Right.”

I watched her scratch Lorelei gently behind the ears. I thought of the queen in the story, stamping her feet and yelling into the night wind, and I thought of Lexy in the Magic Kingdom, leaning against a fiberglass tree, close to tears, trembling with all of an elf queen’s fury. I picked up her hand and kissed it.