Tours of the Black Clock

102

BLAINE STOOD ON THE dock waiting for the ferry that drifted toward him out of the fog on the river. The dark young Greek, with the long blue coat and bright gold buttons, didn’t much like the looks of him. You some sort of gangster or something? the boatman asked. No, Blaine answered. You from the city? said the boatman. Which city, said Blaine after a moment, I’ve come from a lot of cities. I’ve come looking for a woman. The ferry started back across the river. Maybe, said the boatman, you mean a woman you’ve been following a long time. That’s right, the big man answered dully. He stood on the edge of the boat with his hands on the rail looking out into the fog. Young Zeno was small next to Blaine. Halfway out into the fog Blaine couldn’t see either the shore of the river or the island. Is it far? he asked finally.

Feeling wily, Zeno said, Why yes, that’s it, it’s far. It’s quite far. It’s quite a trip, actually, over to the island. The big man didn’t seem completely bright to him. Now it might be better, the young boatman went on, that we either go on back, or I drop you off at the house there until the fog lifts. He pointed north to where Blaine could see in the fog the outline of a shack that stood on four wooden pillars over the water. There’s a stove in there and a bed. I can bring you some food over from the shore later on. When the fog lifts you’re just that much closer to the island, if you don’t want to go back to the mainland, that is.

Tell you the truth, Zeno added, I haven’t seen any woman like you’re talking about. Not at all. It’s probably quite a waste of your time, this whole thing.

I’ll look for myself, said Blaine. He studied the fog for some sign of the island. OK, said Blaine, I’ll wait at the house.

It wasn’t much of a house. When Zeno left him on the landing and disappeared with the boat, all that was left of the world was the gray of the fog and the river; it was more like a small room in the middle of time, hidden and undiagrammed. Inside was the bed, a stove that had only a stick or two of wood and several chunks of coal, a table and chair, an oil lamp. Blaine lit the lamp and sat on the bed with his hands on the tops of his legs. After an hour he got back up and went out on the landing of the shack to see if the fog had lifted or the boatman was returning.

Several more hours passed; soon it would be dark. Blaine realized now that he was a prisoner in the middle of the river waiting for someone to come to him out of the fog. In the same way he didn’t move from his desk in the New York hotel room across the street from where Dania had lived, he didn’t move now from his place on the landing. He stood listening to the water, and then he leaned over the rail to look far down into the river below its surface. Below the surface of the river, Dania swam in her black cold glide past the roots of civilization. She could see him up there, looking down. She rose through the water to him, she shot from the water and found his big pawlike hands there waiting to pull her up. When he pulled her up out of the water he almost fell back with her; and there he stood holding her a long while, sometimes daring to look down at the wet hair that lay against her face and the simple salmon-colored dress that clung to her body. Her face was set against his chest and she was shivering. He held her and stood absolutely still with her in his arms as though to move at all would lose her; he knew at this moment they wouldn’t live together in a house built from any blue map. As he held her closer to him than he ever had before or would again, he knew the lost despair the client felt his final night when he held her and knew she would never be his, would always be, in his hands, untouchable. Finally she shivered so badly he had to take her into the house and wrap the blanket from the bed around her. Then he sat in the chair as she slumped on the bed with teeth chattering. “The man with the boat didn’t come back like he said,” Blaine told her. “He left me here. He wants me to die.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” she said. After a moment she explained, “He was protecting me.”

“He loves you too,” Blaine nodded, understanding.

“Why are you here?”

“I came to bring the map of the house,” Blaine said.

“Thank you.”

“I got to Ohio,” he said, “and remembered I left it in New York.”

For a moment she appeared very annoyed. Then she smiled and laughed. “Oh.” She said, “How did you find me?”

“Hunches.”

“Oh,” she laughed again.

“I don’t get many good hunches,” he said.

She just continued laughing. “You turned out to be the strangest one of all, didn’t you,” she finally said. “Of all the strange men.”

“I watched you every night,” he said, “every night you danced. Don’t know much about dancers except—”

“In clubs and movies.”

“I was only someone who knows about the things people do that they’re not supposed to and that they’ve always done anyway. Just people’s secrets,” he said. “Sometimes in the middle of a secret you don’t know what. You just don’t know what anymore. I saw you dance and there was something secret about it.”

She pulled the blanket closer. He saw she was thinking about something else now; he was going to say something about all the men, and couldn’t decide. “What’s your name?” she said.

“Blaine.” He said, “All the men.”

“The men?”

“Who died when you danced.” Not just those two, he thought watching her, because he knew she was thinking of the two who fell from the sky through the window. “The others. In the papers.”

“What others?” she asked, still thinking. “There were others?” she said after a moment. She began to cry then. He turned away from her when she began to cry because he didn’t want to soften.

“Every time you danced,” he said.

“Don’t you know,” she finally said when she’d stopped crying, “how long I waited for someone to come accuse me of something? I got tired of being men’s dreams. I got tired of being Paul’s, I got tired of being Joaquin’s. I was tired of being yours when I didn’t even know I was yours. I never meant to be anyone’s dream but my own. If I dance someone’s dream does it have to be my dream too?” She stopped shivering; the blanket fell from her, along with something else she’d held much longer. “It was your dream.” She stood up from the bed and ran her hands over her face: She pushed back her wet hair. “I may have danced but you watched me.”

Blaine was confused. He watched her walk back out toward the landing ready to plunge into the cold river again and swim back toward the island. “My dream?” he said in some consternation.

She said to him from the landing, “I’ll tell Zeno to come pick you up. It may not be till morning, though.” She nodded toward the fog. “Unless you want to swim to town.”

Blaine was still trying to understand. “But—”

“Don’t you see,” she said with some exasperation, “it could just as easily have had nothing to do with me. It could just as easily have had everything to do with you.” She looked toward the water once and then back at him. “You thought someone was dying every time I danced. But maybe that wasn’t it at all,” she said. “Maybe,” she said, before disappearing, “someone was dying every time you watched me dance.”

He lunged toward the landing not with any thought of pulling her back from the river, but rather to convince himself, to provide himself with the evidence of his own eyes, that she’d been there at all; a ripple on the surface of the water would do. He still wasn’t sure when he turned back into the house, even though he could clearly see the ripples and even, he believed, her form disappearing into the black depths of the river. Even though the air of the shack was still heavy with her presence and the sound of what she said. That he wasn’t sure, however, perhaps said more about him than her, as she’d implied: if men insisted on seeing her flesh and blood as the apparition of the promises they once made to each other and then betrayed, that final betrayal was theirs, not hers. He slept that night in the house on the river, slept rather well, actually. Somewhere in the final moments of this life, even as a dim slow man whose good heart was never sophisticated enough to understand the Twentieth Century sins that God never thought of, he understood something; and what she’d said to him remained the last words on his mind. “I know,” he said to himself simply, opening his eyes; and he might have grasped what he knew and held it and looked at it had he not been distracted by the fire. He sat up in bed and gazed at the house on fire around and above him. And then he didn’t know anymore. He would have liked to know it again but there wasn’t the time. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said at last, before the secret room in which he’d always lived burned to a size much smaller than a man.

T.O.T.B.C. — 13