“Okay, Anna. Sure. Uptight.”
I walked slowly home to The Busted Ftush. There was a sour smell in the night air, like a broken drain. Anna was a very tidy little biscuit, with her old dark eyes set in that child’s face. She exuded a tantalizing Savor of corruption, of secret, unspeakable experience. There had been times in my life when I would have been happy to help her pass the time until old Harv died and then talked her into letting me help her take the Madana home, by way of a lot of nice islands.
But I had seen the crocodile tears bulging in her dark eyes when she had said, “Any day now.” And I had seen the greed behind the tears, the impulse to break into laughter. Everything old Harv had is now mine, fella. All, all mine. During those past two years she had probably been dreadfully afraid that he would live forever.
When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it malces you take a closer look at your own.
We are all at the mercy of the scriptwriters, directors, and actors in cinema and television. Man is a herd creature, social and imitative. We learn the outward manifestations of inner stress, patterning reaction to what we have learned. And because the visible ways we react are so often borrowed, we wonder about the truth of what is happening underneath. Do I really feel pain, grief, shock, loss?
It is as if we look inside and take a tentative rap at some bell that hangs in there. I had the horrid feeling that maybe my pain was tempered by some sick measure of relief, that I had escaped the trap of a permanent twoness.
Take a rap at that bell, dreading a possible fiat, cracked, dissonant sound of self-pity, of a grubby selfishness.
But it rang true. It rang for her, for my lost girl. The loving and the losing were still larger than life. Than my life. The sound of the bell was almost unbearable. I was like a rat in a cage, subjected to su- personic experimentation. They run back and forth and roll at last onto their backs, chewing their paws bloody. I wanted to swim straight out into the sea. Or go visit Anna and help her into bed. Each was a form of drowning.
64
5 – On Monday morning I awoke glum, got up glum’ dressed glum. The sky was a bright pewter, a radiance that cast no shadow but made people squint and walk hunched over, as if searching for something. It would be windless and silent one moment, then a hard blast would come slamming past, picking up dust devils and scraps of paper before sub” siding into stillness. At sea on a day like this I would have been laying a course to the nearest shelter and checking the fuel level to see how fast I dared go to get there. It is the kind of weather Mat makes people cross.
Meyer was cross when he arrived at eleven for reheated coffee.
“How are you?” he asked, peering at me.
“Peachy.”
“I’m sorry. It is the standard question one asks. How did you get rid of little Anna?”
‘walked her back to her personal ship. What made you jump to the conclusion I got rid of her?”
“Not such a big jump. Why shouldn’t you get rid of her? There’d be no reason to keep her around.”
“Who brought her and dumped her on me?”
“Lilt MacNair. And it wasn’t her fault She just couldn’t get the Farmer woman to leave.”
“Farmer?”
“Anna Farmer.’,
“Don’t look so exasperated, Meyer. I never caught her last name. Is she worth talking about, even? And does it matter a damn one way or another what I do or don’t do with my days or with my nights?”
“Aha!” he said. “Tragic jigger of a man.”
“Meyer, I know what you are trying to do, and I forgive you. But don’t keep it up. Understand?”
He stared and finally nodded. “All right. I was out of line. A transparent, clumsy attempt to cheer the troops. What I came over for, aside from dispensing hollow cheer, was to complain about the bureaucracy. And to give you a conundrum to occupy your mind.”