Little, Big

embraced; perhaps not. “You can find your room?”

“Sure.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

He took the fifteen and a half steps—bumping his flank against the absurd commode he always forgot was there—and put out his hand, and it touched his faceted glass knob. He lit no light once inside, though he knew that a candle and matches were there on the night-table, knew how to find them, knew the scarred underside of the table where he could strike the match. The odor (his own, cold, faint, but familiar, with an admixture of child’s smell, Lily’s twins who had camped there) spoke in a constant old murmur to him of past things. He stood unmoving for a moment, seeing by smell the armchair where much of his childhood’s happiness had been had, the armchair just large enough and unsprung enough for him to curl in with a book or a pad of paper, and the calm lamp beside it, and the table where cookies and milk or tea and toast could glow warmly in the lamplight; and the wardrobe from out whose door, when left ajar, ghosts and hostile figures used to steal to frighten him (what had become of those figures, once so familiar? Dead, dead of loneliness, with no one to spook); and the narrow bed and its fat quilt and its two pillows. From an early age he’d insisted on having two pillows, though he’d only rested his head on one. He liked the rich luxury of them: inviting. All there. The weight of the odors was heavy on his soul, like chains, like old burdens reassumed.

He undressed in the dark and crawled into the cold bed. It was like embracing himself. Since the adolescent spurt of growing that had brought him to Daily Alice’s height, his feet, when he was in this bed, curled down over the end, and had made two depressions there in the mattress. His feet found them now. The lumps were where they had always been. There was in fact only one pillow, and it smelled vaguely pissy. Cat? Child? He wouldn’t sleep, he thought; he couldn’t decide whether he wished he had been bold enough to gulp more of Smoky’s brandy or glad that this agony was his now, a lot to make up for, starting tonight. He had, anyway, plenty to occupy his wide-awake thoughts. He rolled over carefully into Position Two of his unvarying bedtime choreography, and lay that way long awake in the suffocating familiar darkness.

IV.

You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a syiph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.

—Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

No, I understand now,” Auberon said, calm in the woods—it was so simple, really. “I didn’t, for a long time, but I do now. You just can’t hold people, you can’t own them. I mean it’s only natural, a natural process really. Meet. Love. Part. Life goes on. There was never any reason to expect her to stay always the same—I mean ‘in love,’ you know.” There were those doubt-quotes of Smoky’s, heavily indicated. “I don’t hold a grudge. I can’t.”

“You do,” Grandfather Trout said. “And you don’t understand.”

Nothing for Something

He had gone out at dawn, awakened by that abrasive thing like thirst or need that always awoke him at dawn since he’d become a drunkard. Unable to recapture sleep, unwilling to stare at the room, his room, which in the untender dawn looked alien and un- familiar, he d dressed. Put on his overcoat and hat against the misty chill. And climbed up through the woods, past the lake island where the white gazebo stood up to its knees in mist, up to where a falls fell melodiously into a deep dark pool. There, he’d done as his mother had instructed him, though believing none of it or trying to believe none of it. But, believe it or not, he was after all a Barnable, Drinkwater on his mother’s side; his great-grandfather didn’t refuse his summons. He couldn’t have if he’d wanted to.

“Well, though, but I’d like to explain to her,” Auberon said. “Tell her… Tell her, anyhow. That I don’t mind. That she has my respect for making the decision she did. So I thought if you knew where she was, even approximately where…”

“I don’t,” said Grandfather Trout.

Auberon sat back from the pool’s edge. What was he doing here? If the one piece of information he had wanted—the one piece which of all pieces he should not any longer care to seek—was to be still withheld from him? How could he anyway have asked for it? “What I don’t understand,” he said at last, “is why I have to go on making such a big deal out of it. I mean there are lots of fish in the sea. She’s gone, I can’t find her; so why do I cling to it? Why do I keep making her up? These ghosts, these phantoms…”

“Oh, well,” said the fish. “Not your fault. Those phantoms. Those are their work.”

“Their work?”

“Don’t want you to know it,” said Grandfather Trout, “but yes, their work; just to keep you sharp set; lures; no worry there.”

“No worry?”

“Just let ’em pass by. There’ll be more. Just let ’em pass by. Don’t tell them I told you so.”

“Their work,” Auberon said. “Why?”

“Oh, well,” Grandfather Trout said guardedly. “Why; well, why…”

“Okay,” Auberon said. “Okay, see? See what I mean?” An innocent victim, tears sprang to his eyes. “Well, hell with them anyway,” he said. “Figments. I don’t care. It’ll pass. Phantoms or no phantoms. Let ’em do their worst. It won’t last forever.” That was saddest of all; sad but true. A trembling sigh covered him and passed. “It’s only natural,” he said. “It won’t last forever. It can’t.”

“It can,” Grandfather Trout said. “It will.”

“No,” Auberon said. “No, you think it will sometimes. But it passes. You think— Love. It’s such a whole, such a permanent thing. So big, so—separate from you. With a weight of its own. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“But that’s not so. It’s just a figment too. I don’t have to do its bidding. It just withers away on its own. When its over after all you don’t even remember what it was like.” That’s what he had learned in his little park: that it was possible, reasonable even, to discard his broken heart like a broken cup; who needed it? “Love: It’s all personal. I mean my love doesn’t have anything to do with her—not the real her. It’s just something I feel. I think it connects me to her. But it doesn’t. That’s a myth, a myth I make up; a myth about her and me. Love is a myth.”

“Love is a myth,” Grandfather Trout said. “Like summer.”

“What?”

“In winter,” Grandfather Trout said, “summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”

Auberon raised his eyes to the crook-fingered trees that rose above the sounding pool. Leaves were uncurling from ten thousand tips, What he was being told, he saw, was that he had accomplished nothing in the little park by Art of Memory, nothing at all; that he was as burdened as ever, unrelievably. That couldn’t be so. Could he really love her forever, live in the house of her forever, inescapably?

“In summer,” he said, “winter is a myth…”

“Yes,” said the trout.

“A report, a rumor, not to be believed.”

“Yes.”

He had loved her and she had left him, without reason, without farewell. If he loved her always, if there was