materialist. The only books I came across were the usual bestseller-type things – I'm OK, You're OK, How to Be Your Own Best Friend – amp; a few dusty Victorian sets that you see in old ladies' parlors amp; no one ever looks at anymore. Carol seemed a bit disappointed; I guess she'd been expecting a museum.
Rosie apologized for the place's looking so 'spartan' amp; said something about not being home much. Until a year or two ago, apparently, he spent most of his time abroad or in the library – 'sometimes both,' he said. I kept picturing libraries amp; reading rooms all around the world, and in each of them, somewhere in the corner, that same wizened little face.
By then the two of us were close to dropping off, amp; I could see exactly what was coming; in fact, I should have seen it the moment that buzzer sounded back in Carol's apartment. Somehow, without meaning to, I had cast myself in the dumbest role of all: I was the horny but thwarted lover in one of those exasperating Howard Hawks comedies, condemned to spend the night alone. And sure enough, Rosie proceeded to stick me on a sofa in the anteroom adjoining his, with Carol in the spare room amp; his own fat little self parked neatly between us.
So I had to go to bed celibate again, with a premature hangover, a bad mood, amp; a useless hard-on. I couldn't get my mind off Carol -the sight of her half out of those flimsy white Woolworth's panties, looking like a skinny little farm child with her small ass amp; slim white thighs amp; solemn expression, but also incredibly sexy. Boy, do I want her badly.
Somehow, despite it all, I slept without a single dream amp; got up feeling just as lousy. Rosie was puttering around making breakfast amp; whistling some tuneless little song – he looked awful; I think he'd taken out his false teeth – but Carol was more distant than ever. Later, as we rode downtown together on the subway, she seemed preoccupied with her apartment amp; her job. Clearly it was time to say goodbye. So I got off at Forty-Second Street, sat through half a porn film called The Coming Thing, amp; took the bus back here to Poroth Farm.
Book Five: The White Ceremony
Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more delightful than others.
Machen, The White People
July Seventh
Just as well that Jeremy was gone. Carol needed time to get her thoughts in order. That he'd had her so worked up last night, that she'd been naked, exposed before him, and so obviously excited, ready to yield – somehow it all seemed far more intimate than if they'd actually gone to bed together. And to think that, the entire time, he'd had his own pants on! The whole thing was just too embarrassing. It almost made her angry.
It also made her angry to return to her apartment and find the gas still on. 'Couldn't the men fix it?' she asked the superintendent, who stood grumpily in his first-floor doorway with a Spanish station on the radio behind him and something spicy frying in the kitchen.
'They comin' round this afternoon sometime,' he said, impatient to return to his meal. 'These guys, they're very busy. You come back tonight, everything be fixed.'
'You mean they haven't been here yet?' said Carol. 'That's funny, somebody's sure been up there.'
Back upstairs, careful not to breathe in the vicinity of the kitchen, she looked around. No, she had obviously been wrong; she could find nothing out of place, nothing missing or stolen (not that there was anything worth stealing, she reminded herself), no real sign that anyone had been here since last night. The sunlight streamed harmlessly through the open windows; the apartment still reeked of gas, and she was reluctant to stay more than a minute or two. Idly she straightened up the stack of papers in her bedroom, more of Rosie's articles to plod through. Myths of the Cherokee (Washington, 1900). Description of a Singular Aboriginal Race Inhabiting the Summit of the Neilgherry Hills (London, 1832). They would be here when she got back; it was nice hot to have to look at them now. She would change her clothes, go off to work, and try to forget everything that had happened last night.
Holding her breath, she entered the kitchen, rinsed out a few glasses – no sense letting the repairman think she kept a dirty house – and wiped off the counter. In the living room she fastened back the curtains, wondering if it was safe to leave the old TV set unguarded, and decided that no one would want it anyway. If those workmen took anything, she could report them somewhere. She noticed several strands of black hair on the rug near the foot of the couch. There's always something of Rochelle's here, she thought, as she picked them up between two fingers and released them out the window. They drifted downward on the summer breeze, floating like a spiderweb.
The library, despite the heat, was unchanged from the day before; she felt as if she'd never left. There were fewer grad students this time of year, but their elders, those pale wraiths who haunted the long tables and magazine racks each day, took no notice of the season; they had no beaches or resorts to flee to when the weather grew warm. There were the usual piles of ragged-looking books to put away, and she did so silently for most of the afternoon, but her mind wasn't on her work. She was dunking of her apartment: of the super – how rude some men were, they certainly did what they pleased! – and of Jeremy, who'd made her feel so vulnerable. Was he laughing over her right this minute? Did he think of her at all? Maybe to him she was just another conquest. And she was, she told herself, there was no sense denying it; she had been conquered last night. She thought of Rosie – and quickly pushed the thought from her mind. He was the one man who treated her kindly; she didn't want to think about what she had seen in the restaurant last night, it was too ugly…
Later, as she patrolled the aisles of the children's section, she was almost able to put the restaurant incident from her mind. Mrs Schumann was reading Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales to a story group at the table in the corner. Carol passed by from time to time on her rounds and caught the tale in snatches: 'The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.' No doubt the little monsters had specifically asked for that one. It was the most repellently bloody-minded of the lot: a little girl who pulled the wings off flies, and her bizarre punishment, standing helpless and frozen while these same insects crawled over her face and body.
She was glad to see that two little boys, at least, were having no part of such sick fantasies. They were crouched before the bottom shelf of the biology section, a shelf that, Carol knew, contained some junior-level health and medical texts. Strolling round the floor, she passed them twice; they appeared to be engrossed in an oversize anatomy book, their small, intense faces studying something hidden by its covers. Carol surmised, from the way one of them glanced guiltily over his shoulder at her the second time she walked by, that the two were searching for nude pictures; it was a common preoccupation among the children who used the library. The bank of fans atop the bookshelves hummed, and Mrs Schumann's voice continued to drone across the room, echoing like a memory.
On Carol's third round she noticed that the thinner of the two boys was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the other kneeling. She was debating whether to direct them to chairs – their pants were going to be filthy when they got up – when suddenly the larger of the two made a little dip of his head and fell forward onto the other boy, clutching him in a furious hug. In a second they were rolling over on the floor, grunting with exertion and tearing at one another's faces, the book tossed aside. Carol was bigger than they were – as the assistant supervisor had once reminded her – but not so much bigger that she was able to tear the two apart. She ran for Mrs Schumann, who stood up from the reading circle like some great plump monster rising from a pool, and together they managed to separate the two combatants. They were brothers, it turned out, fighting not over the volume on the floor but over a small pocketknife which each claimed as his own. The fight ended with the knife in Mrs Schumann's desk drawer, permanently confiscated, and the two boys warned not to set foot inside the library again without a note from their mother – a note which, both women knew, would never be produced.
It was the knife that brought the memories back, memories of the previous night, the incident at dinner…
She had been so happy as they'd all sat down, happy that Rosie and Jeremy seemed to be hitting it off; happy, in a way, perhaps, that Rosie had arrived in time to stop her from doing something irrevocable; happy just to be spending a summer night in the company of two men she liked, in a comfortable candlelit restaurant with good food and an air conditioner that worked.
She remembered how Rosie, smiling fondly, had been talking to her of her future; how all his words had gone to her head, all his talk about courses and openings and opportunities. 'You're an unusually talented young lady,' he'd been saying, exuberantly waving his steak knife. 'I expect great things from you!'
Then suddenly, like the ending of a dream – she felt a chill even now as she remembered it – suddenly the lights had flickered once, twice, and gone off, leaving only the candles on the table.
It had all happened in an instant. Seconds later the power had come back on; once again the air conditioner's hum had filled the room, and with it movement, conversation, laughter. But in that frozen moment of shadows and silence, with only the candle on the table for illumination, she had seen Rosie regarding her – and it had been like
