lunatic on his family, not that they would notice probably, hopeless themselves; and the price had not been resistable. Odd how a man of wide sympathies like himself started such hares and harebrains wherever he went.
Outside the park, framed in sycamores from where he sat, was a small classical courthouse (Drinkwater’s too for all he knew), surmounted with statues of lawgivers at even intervals. Moses. Solon. Etc. A place to put a law-case, certainly. His own infuriating struggle with Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. Those coffered brass doors not yet open for business the locked entrance to his inheritance, the egg-and-dart molding the endless repetition of delay and hope, hope and delay.
Stupid. He looked away. What was the point? No matter how gracefully the building accepted his case in all its complexity (and as he glanced again sidelong at it he saw that it could and did) it was needless. How could he forget all that? The doles they eked out to him, enough to keep him from starvation, enough to keep him signing (with an increasingly furious scrawl) the instruments, waivers, pleas and powers they presented him with as those stony-eyed immortals there proffered tablets, books, codices: the last of the last had bought this gin he now drank of, and more than was left in the bottle would be necessary for him to forget the indignity of his pleading for it, the injustice of it all. Diocletian counted out wrinkled bills from petty cash.
Hell with that. He left the courthouse outside. In here there was no law.
A year to place upon it. She had said that the value of her system was how it would cast up, spontaneously, what you didn’t know out of the proper arrangement of what you did.
Well: there was a thing he didn’t know.
If he could believe what the old woman had said, if he could, wouldn’t he then set to work here, commit every tulip-bed and arrowheaded fence-post, every whitewashed stone, every budding leaf to memory, so that he could distribute among them every tiny detail of lost Sylvie? Wouldn’t he then march furiously sniffing up and down the curving paths, like this mutt that had just entered with his master, searching, searching, going sunwise then antisunwise, searching until the one single simple answer arose, the astonishing lost truth, that would make him clutch his brow and cry
No, he would not.
He had lost her; she was gone, and for good. That fact was all that excused and made reasonable, even proper, his present degradation. If her whereabouts were revealed to him now, though he had spent a year trying to learn them, he would avoid them of all places.
And yet. He didn’t want to find her, not any more; but he would like to know why. Would like to know (timidly, subjunctively) why she had left him never to return, without a word, without, apparently, a backward glance. Would like to know, well, what was up with her nowadays, if she was all right, whether she thought of him ever, and in what mode, kindly or otherwise. He recrossed his legs, tapping one broken shoe in the air. No: it was just as well, really; just as well that he knew the old woman’s batty and monstrous system to be useless. That Spring could never be the spring she had blossomed for him, nor that shoot their love, nor that trowel the tool by which his rageful and unhappy heart had been scored with joy.
In the First Place
He hadn’t at first found her disappearance all that alarming. She’d run off before, for a few nights or a weekend, where and for what reasons he never pressed her about, he was cool, he was a hands-off guy. She hadn’t ever before taken every stitch of clothes and every souvenir, but he didn’t put it beyond her, she could bring them all back in an hour, at any hour, having missed a fleeing bus or train or plane or been unable to bear whatever relative or friend or lover she had camped with. A mistake. The greatness of her desires, of her longing for life to come out right even in the impossible conditions under which hers was lived, led her into such mistakes. He rehearsed fatherly or avuncular speeches with which, unhurt and unalarmed and not angry, he would counsel her after he welcomed her back.
He looked for notes. The Folding Bedroom though small was such a chaos that he might easily have overlooked one; it had slipped down behind the stove, she had propped it on the windowsill and it had blown out into the farmyard, he had closed it up in the bed. It would be a note in her huge, wild round hand; it would start “Hi!” and be signed with x’s for kisses. It had been on the back of something inconsequential, which he had thrown out even as he searched through inconsequential papers for it. He emptied the wastebasket, but when its contents lay around his ankles he stopped the search and stood stock still, having suddenly imagined another sort of note entirely, a note with no “Hi!” and no kisses. It would resemble a love letter in its earnest, overwrought tone, but it wouldn’t be a love letter.
There were people he could call. When (after endless trouble) they had had a phone put in, amazing George Mouse, she had used to spend a good amount of time talking to relatives and quasi-relatives in a rapid and (to him) hilarious mixture of Spanish and English, shouting with laughter sometimes and sometimes just shouting. He had taken down none of the numbers she called; she herself often lost the scraps of paper and old envelopes she had written them on, and had to recite them out loud, eyes cast upward, trying out different combinations of the same numbers till she hit on one that sounded right.
And the phone book, when (just hypothetically, there was no immediate need) he consulted it, listed surprising columns, whole armies in fact, of Rodriguezes and Garcias and Fuenteses, with great pompous Christian names, Monserrate, Alejandro, such as he had never heard her use. And talk about pompous names, look at this last guy, Archimedes Zzzyandottie, what on earth.
He went to bed absurdly early, trying to hurry through the hours till her inevitable return; he lay listening to the thump and hum and squeak and wail of night, trying to sort from it the first intimations of her footfalls on the stair, in the hail; his heart quickened, banishing sleep, as he heard inhis mind’s ear the scratch of her red nails on the door. In the morning he woke with a start, unable to remember why she wasn’t next to him; and then remembered that he didn’t know.
Surely around the Farm someone would have heard something, but he would have to be circumspect; he restricted himself to inquiries that, if they ever got back to her, would reveal no possessive distress or fussy prying on his part. But the answers which he got from the farmers raking muck and setting out tomatoes were even less revealing than his questions.
“Seen Sylvie?”
“Sylvie?”
Like an echo. A kind of propriety kept him from approaching George Mouse, for it could be that it was to him she had fled, and he didn’t want to hear that from George, not that he had ever felt competition from his cousin, or jealousy, but, well, he didn’t like any of the possible conversations he could imagine himself and George having on the subject. A weird fear was growing in him. He saw George once or twice, trundling a wheelbarrow in and out of goat sheds, and studied him secretly. His state seemed unchanged.
At evening he fell into a rage, and imagined that, not content with leaving him flat, she had engineered a conspiracy of silence to cover her tracks. “Conspiracy of silence” and “cover her tracks,” he said aloud, more than once that long night, to the furnishings of the Folding Bedroom which were none of them hers. (Hers were at that moment being exclaimed over, one by one, elsewhere, as they were taken from the drawstring bags of the three brown-capped flat-faced thieves who had abstracted them; exclaimed over in cooing small voices one by one before being put away in a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron, to wait for their owner to come and claim them.)
And in the Second Place
The bartender at the Seventh Saint, “their” bartender, didn’t appear for work that night or the next or the next, though Auberon came every night to question him. The new guy wasn’t sure just what had happened to him. Gone to the Coast, maybe. Gone, anyway. Auberon, having no better post from which to keep vigil when he could no longer bear the Folding Bedroom or Old Law Farm, ordered another. One of those periodic upheavals in bar life had taken place among the clientele lately. As evening drew on, he recognized few regulars; they seemed to have
