She opened the door to the right rear bedroom and went in, shutting the door quietly behind her. “ Now there’s a fascinating girl,” William said to Arnold, including him in connoisseurship. “ She creates secret languages, whole poems, without knowing what she is doing.” “ Do you speak any secret languages?” Arnold asked, suddenly feeling that this man was a fool. What was lanthe doing with this person anyway? He felt belittled by his follower. “ Oh,” William continued, “ I fancy myselTa speaker of secret languages. When I was little I used to pretend that I understood French, Spanish, the whole lot. If I heard someone speaking Italian on the street corner, I would nod my head knowingly. This may be because a phrenologist read my head and said that, like Schlei- mann, I would know many tongues before I died.” Arnold felt suddenly dizzy. The white tiles of the old bathroom leapt up to him. As he began to lose consciousness he thought that, yes, this was the sort of place where people were supposed to faint, that it smelled clean and of hospitals, that it at one and the same time beckoned and repelled death. In only seconds of real time he thought of asking William for help, but it seemed so ridiculous. William, after all, was the reason he was dizzy. It was emotionally de trop. The open, affable man standing in a towel, telling him ludicrous things about himself. And lanthe, standing somewhere just out of the field of this drama, somewhere out of this photo- , graph, this tableau. Perhaps she was the photographer waiting to still them forever, lanthe, who had willingly and with few cries of anger or dismay, passed between them, walking like a sleepwalker from one to the other. And here they were, one with a secret language and the other with a fainting spell. His weakness, first brought on by the sight of blood when he was in grade school, had plagued him all of his life. Always at moments like these, moments past understanding, were moments he left, traveling out of his body in a way. “ Hey, are you all right?” “ No.” “ Come here.” William guided Arnold to the edge of the bathtub and, without any ado, pushed his head between his legs, like a good football coach or a father. He patted Arnold on the back. “ Make sure you never faint in a standing position. You could have a stroke. The blood doesn’t make it to the brain and, presto, the brain is gone. You must be careful.” His head clearing a little, the tiles becoming what-not grey, he asked in a mumble, “ How in God’s name could anyone faint in a standing position?” As happened in these situations, Arnold had a picture of himself in his mind’s eye, a picture of a thin, ephemeral self diving out of his body like a good swimmer, a prayer boy. The doorbell rang. William grasped Arnold’s shoulder. “Will you be all right?” “ Yes, I’m all right now.” William ran down the stairs and then Arnold could hear male voices in the hallway. There was the sound of little steps on the stairs and lanthe’s little girl, Leslie, poked her head into the doorway. “ Hi, Arnold.” “ Hi,” Arnold said weakly. Leslie disappeared again. Then Porky stuck his head in. “ Porky, my good man, how are you doing?” Without answer, the little boy disappeared and Arnold could hear his door closing, the door to the attic, where the nautical child slept. Richard, lanthe’s ex-husband, must be dropping off the children. Arnold, with some remaining feeling for form, forced himself to get up. He was trembling a little. He didn’t know why exactly, why these fits hit him the way they did. As he went out into the upper hall, Porky was just coming out of his door with an armload of books. He still wore the life jacket. This caused lanthe endless amounts of grief. There was no way that she was able to remove it from the body of her son. “We don’t even sail,” she would Arnold felt suddenly dizzy. The white tiles of the old bathroom leapt up to him. As he began to lose consciousness he thought that, yes, this was the sort of place where people were supposed to faint, that it smelled clean and of hospitals. wail, as she threaded first the overshirt and then the T-shirt of her son through the armholes of the canvas jacket before the little boy would fall asleep under the eaves of the roof, so very far from water. “ It rains a lot, I know, but why is he so afraid of drowning?” Arnold had suggested one day that she simply cut the jacket off and burn it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It might, after all, be the only thing that kept the child afloat. Arnold stepped carefully down the hall, keeping his head over his body as if it were an egg. Of course he could faint on the stairs, his head higher than his feet, and then what William had warned him about might happen. Richard stood in the hall, affecting the position that Arnold had seen him in so often, always reminding him of one of the saints in the drawings of the old masters. There were arrows somewhere, unseen to the naked eye, sticking out of this man. He was so wounded, so muted, like a note ready to be played and yet not played. Richard stood with his eyes to the ground, trying to subdue his inner light for these others. Arnold grasped the fine artistic hand of Richard. “ Hello, Richard.” Richard just looked up and smiled into his eyes. “ Are you dropping off the children? I’ll be happy to watch them. I’m just packing up my books.” There was no need to apologize with this man because Richard understood everything. He took it all in and gave nothing back. “ I’m bringing her wood,” he smiled briefly. “ It won’t take long. The kids are with me this weekend.” lanthe had many fires and, at times, lt was lanthe’s belief that there was no having another person, that they all remained in these positions of pursuit and retreat. Arnold believed this was her life jacket, that she and Porky were not unlike. And, oh yes, it was perhaps this gift of fires that caused the gods to be so angry with her. She had fires but did not have fire herself. No, what would William do eventually? Did lanthe tell William that it was all very much like “ An Ode to a Grecian Urn” ? Keatsian Vase was what she called it with him. This meant that she and the man, whoever the man happened to be at the time, were forced into positions of pursuit and departure at all times. “ I enjoy it the most,” lanthe had insisted, “ because I am the one who is pursuing. You see, I have taken this from the man.” It was, therefore, lanthe’s belief that there was no having another person, that they all remained in these positions of pursuit and retreat. It was like sheep really. They had been in the country one day for a picnic where there was a small group of sheep, lanthe, in her playful fashion, had tried to tame them, moving among the daisies and field blossoms with a bunch of grass and an apple to coax them. As she moved slowly and gently toward them, they had just as slowly and gently moved away. But, interestingly enough, when she walked away from them they started to graze close to where she and Arnold were eating their lunch. As she bit into an apple, she had thought for a moment that they might finally be wanting to be friends and had leapt up once again, only to find that they were just as inaccessible, never once moving their graceful heads from the long grass. Finally, lanthe had gotten into tears and he took her back home, where she went directly to bed, and they made love in a ferocious manner. She was always ready to make love. She was like a pool; under all the fury she was placid and cool. The same pool, time after time, so willing, so agreeable. “Yes,” she had said, “ but the pool reflects the moon if you learn to understand.” But Arnold never could. There was no ultimate sense of possessing this placidity, this underlying calm which, for all of lanthe’s emotion and anger, lay there, accepting and peaceful. This was why they all shared her so well, why there was no jealousy. Arnold wondered dizzily if there would ever be a man who would see and understand the moon. It didn’t matter because lanthe accepted it all so completely. '“ Like flies to wanton boys, the gods kill us for their sport.’ ’’This was her favorite Shakespearean quote. And then the line that she said her father always used: ‘“ Fuck ’em all but six, and save them for pallbearers.’ ” Arnold had suggested once that she may have misinterpreted this saying. “ Do you ski?” William asked Richard, waving a magazine in front of him. “ Look at this turn. I have a friend who turns like that. My God, it ’s beautiful. It’s poetry.” He waved the magazine in Arnold’s direction. “ Yes, cross-country,” Richard replied. Arnold could not afford to ski. He was not a professional. Richard was a doctor, lanthe insisted that everyone who was to be found very high on the slopes was a doctor, pure Marxian economics, with a bit of the cream rising to the top. Sometimes Arnold felt that if there were one thing he really hated it was the physically fit, the good specimen. Richard was just such a type, the body clean and sucked in without protest. The limbs long and graceful, ready to dance into a run at a moment’s provocation. But after all it seemed needless, it was the white rat in the maze,'jumping and hurrying for no apparent reason. The casual observer could see that the poor rodent was in a maze. He, Arnold, was perfecting the only, the rare, path to freedom. It was not the physical, it was the mental. It was not life exactly, it was imagination. Every morning of the time that Arnold spent with her, lanthe would wake up at five in the morning, dive into her grey jogging suit, and run out the front door to the lake. He had argued with her about imagination, but she, she insisted, was a good Greek and was trying, through the process of running, to force her mind to be at one with her body. It was her contention that the mind-body question, and all of its manifestations to be found in the populations of the Western World, was what caused pain and suffering. “What happens when you finally achieve harmony?” “ You slip into obscurity,” she had said. “ No one notices you anymore.” Richard and William were discussing how each of them had climbed Mt. Baker: the avalanches, the uncertain peaks. “ It all makes me sick to my stomach,” Arnold couldn’t help saying. They had all climbed lanthe. “ Could I help you with those books?” Richard asked. Arnold didn’t answer but instead went down to the basement, where lanthe hid the wood from the neighbors, and brought up some logs so that they could have a nice fire. When he climbed back up the dark and spidery stairs, the children were standing in the hallway. Porky had a small sailboat under his arm that he took baths with. Leslie stood a full head taller than Porky and was looking at the men and combing her hair with a very large pink plastic comb. William and Richard shook hands and Richard was off, the two children calling and dragging after him as they walked out on the lawn where last year’s toys hid in the long grass. Arnold made the fire with the very dry wood and kindling taken from an old sea chest by the hearth, lanthe’s white cat came over and, as usual, stretched out about two inches from the flame. “ It’s a wonder that cat doesn’t cook.” he said to the air. Then just be14 Clinton St. Quarterly
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