She held out her hand, and Ransom stared at it. “How much for ‘kiss’?”
“Ask Cell. He came up with it.”
Ran looked at Cell, and Cell looked back with grave, deep eyes, and just said, “‘Kiss’ is free.”
“Ho, shit…” Reclining in his chair, Ran pushed his hair back with both hands. “Where is this all going, guys? I have a real bad feeling. Where is this supposed to end?”
No one answered.
“Daddy?”
They all turned and there was Hope, in cat pajamas, halfway down the stairs. “I’m scared, Daddy,” she said. “Will you read a book to me?”
Ransom, with a flight of desperation in his eyes, looked at Claire, at Hope, and back at Claire again.
“Can you handle it?” Claire asked.
He took his daughter in his arms and started up the stairs.
FIFTY-THREE
In the kitchen, as they cleaned the plates, Claire cut the water off and turned. “Go ahead and say it, Shan.”
“You’re a grown woman, Claire. You don’t need advice from me. Ransom is a pain, and life is short.”
“All true.”
“I’ll be on the porch,” said Cell.
Claire looked at him, but that was all, so he just went.
“Anything I tell you,” Shanté said, “is probably something you’ve already told yourself….”
“No doubt. But?”
Shanté laid the flatware in a tangled heap. “Okay, what worries me? And this isn’t about Ransom, Claire…. Right now, I’m thinking about you and Hope and Charlie and your family, all right?”
“What worries you is…,” Claire prompted with a stony face.
“I don’t know exactly what you’re feeling, but I can form an educated guess. I’ve seen it many times, Claire, I’ve been in the same place myself….”
“Go on.”
“You start out at a pitch so high you think no one else can grasp your feelings. You’ve stepped through a magic door and found a love that no one else has ever felt before on earth. And maybe it’s true. Maybe once or twice in a thousand or a million times those feelings last, and maybe you and Cell are among the blessed. But speaking for me personally, Claire? I’ve rarely seen it play out that way. In fact, I’ve never seen it once. What I’ve seen is people flying, who crash and fall back, burning, to the ground. I’ve seen the white heat pass into mere warmth. And the light, the brilliant light, Claire, gathers shadows. Sometimes it takes a year, sometimes two, but chances are, you won’t die at the peak like Juliet and Romeo. You’ll come back down. Most people do. Then they find themselves where you and Ran are now, with ‘issues,’ in a different marriage to a different person identical to the marriages they left. For most people, Claire, this kind of passion is a dream they wake up from. And when you do, after that year or two, your children will look at you with something broken in them, honey, something you won’t live long enough to ever put back right. Your life and theirs will be in pieces, and you’ll have wounded the larger Self you truly are, which is not just you, Claire. I don’t mean to preach, but there’s your ego—it’s not a dirty word, and I don’t mean it in that way…. It has legitimate needs you have a legitimate right to seek, but your Self, Claire, your Self is something larger. It includes your children and your family and tribe and your community, and it includes your husband, too. And if you act against that, Claire, if you wound it, my worry is, you’ll be diminished, too.”
“So you can never leave,” Claire said.
Shanté went to her and took her hands. Still holding them, they sat down at the table face-to-face. “People can and do, but the results are always mixed, baby, mixed at best. More generally, they’re fucked up. Listen, Claire, I’ve known you a long time. I know your heart is good and that you’re doing what you think is right. But there’s one more thing I want to tell you. There’s an image in Jung somewhere. It may not mean anything to you, but it’s meant a lot to me, and what it is is Jesus on the cross. Jung says the deeper meaning of the crucifixion is that it represents the ego on the tree of Self. It’s nailed up there and stretched and racked, and the purpose of that suffering is to make it grow, to make the ego grow to accommodate the larger thing that’s underneath, the larger thing we are, and that’s what human life is, Claire. That is human life on earth. Try to escape it, try to climb back down, you shirk your fate and end up queer and smaller than you should have been.”
“What if it’s my Self, though, Shan?” Claire said. “What if it’s my Self that’s on the tree?”
Shanté gave a sober blink. “Well, baby, that’s another matter, then.
That’s a wholly different thing. But, Claire, don’t make him lose the children, too. Because, if you do…”
“If I do, then what? You see where he is. What am I supposed to do?”
Shanté shook her head. “I just don’t know what will be left to hold him to the ground. I really don’t.”
Claire started to reply, but there in the doorway, like a spirit, suddenly was Ran.
“I think you’d better come upstairs,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Both of you,” he said.
In the bedroom, Hope was sitting against her headboard’s painted scene: a little girl in yellow mud boots chasing down a windblown kite. Her face was bright, excited. There was a disturbing avidity in her expression that was not like any four-year-old’s. “I know what it wants,” she said.
“What what wants, Hope?” Claire asked, sitting on the bed.
“The little animal that lives inside me,” she replied with her bright face.
“Do you mean your dog?”
“I don’t know, Mommy. I can’t see it anymore.”
Claire closed her daughter—softly, calmly, firmly—in her arms. “What does it want?”
“Meat and grapes,” Hope said. “It wants to drink my blood, and when I
