The Machineries of Joy Read online

  I began to cry. “Oh, Roger, we’ve never even kissed. This is ridiculous.”

  “Answer me, if she died one week, seven days from now …” He grabbed my arms.

  “But how can you be sure?”

  “I’ll make myself sure! I swear she’ll be dead a week from now, or I’ll never bother you again with this!”

  And he flung the screen doors wide, hurrying off into the day that was suddenly too bright.

  “Roger, don’t—” I cried.

  But my mind thought, Roger do, do something, anything, to start it all or end it all.

  That night in bed I thought, what ways are there for murder that no one could know? Is Roger, a hundred yards away this moment, thinking the same? Will he search the woods tomorrow for toadstools resembling mushrooms, or drive the car too fast and fling her door wide on a curve? I saw the wax dummy witch fly through the air in a lovely soaring arc, to break like ridiculous peanut brittle on an oak, an elm, a maple. I sat up in bed. I laughed until I wept. I wept until I laughed again. No, no, I thought, he’ll find a better way. A night burglar will shock her heart into her throat. Once in her throat, he will not let it go down again, she’ll choke on her own panic.

  And then the oldest, the darkest, most childish thought of all. There’s only one way to finish a woman whose mouth is the color of blood. Being what she is, no relative, not an aunt or a great-grandmother, surprise her with a stake driven through her heart!

  I heard her scream. It was so loud, all the night birds jumped from the trees to cover the stars.

  I lay back down. Dear Christian Anna Marie, I thought, what’s this? Do you want to kill? Yes, for why not kill a killer, a woman who strangled her child in his crib and has not loosened the throttling cord since? He is so pale, poor man, because he has not breathed free air, all of his life.

  And then, unbidden, the lines of an old poem stood up in my head. Where I had read them or who had put them down, or if I had written them myself, within my head over the years, I could not say. But the lines were there and I read them in the dark:

  Some live like Lazarus

  In a tomb of life

  And come forth curious late to twilight hospitals

  And mortuary rooms.

  The lines vanished. For a while I could recall no more, and then, unable to fend it off, for it came of itself, a last fragment appeared in the dark:

  Better cold skies seen bitter to the North

  Than stillborn stay, all blind and gone to ghost.

  If Rio is lost, well, love the Arctic Coast!

  O ancient Lazarus

  Come ye forth.

  There the poem stopped and let me be. At last I slept, restless, hoping for the dawn, and good and final news.

  The next day I saw him pushing her along the pier and thought, Yes, that’s it! She’ll vanish and be found a week from now, on the shore, like a sea monster floating, all face and no body.

  That day passed. Well, surely, I thought, tomorrow …

  The second day of the week, the third, the fourth and then the fifth and sixth passed, and on the seventh day one of the maids came running up the path, shrieking.

  “Oh, it’s terrible, terrible!”

  “Mrs. Harrison?” I cried. I felt a terrible and quite uncontrollable smile on my face.

  “No, no, her son! He’s hung himself!”

  “Hung himself?” I said ridiculously, and found myself, stunned, explaining to her. “Oh, no, it wasn’t him was going to die, it was—” I babbled. I stopped, for the maid was clutching, pulling my arm.

  “We cut him down, oh, God, he’s still alive, quick!”

  Still alive? He still breathed, yes, and walked around through the other years, yes, but alive? No.

  It was she who gained strength and lived through his attempt to escape her. She never forgave his trying to run off.

  “What do you mean by that, what do you mean?” I remember her screaming at him as he lay feeling his throat, in the cottage, his eyes shut, wilted, and I hurried in the door. “What do you mean doing that, what, what?”

  And looking at him there I knew he had tried to run away from both of us, we were both impossible to him. I did not forgive him that either, for a while. But I did feel my old hatred of him become something else, a kind of dull pain, as I turned and went back for a doctor.

  “What do you mean, you silly boy?” she cried.

  I married Paul that autumn.

  After that, the years poured through the glass swiftly. Once each year, Roger led himself into the pavilion to sit eating mint ice with his limp empty-gloved hands, but he never called me by my name again, nor did he mention the old promise.

  Here and there in the hundreds of months that passed I thought, for his own sake now, for no one else, sometime, somehow he must simply up and destroy the dragon with the hideous bellows face and the rust-scaled hands. For Roger and only for Roger, Roger must do it.

  Surely this year, I thought, when he was fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. Between seasons I caught myself examining occasional Chicago papers, hoping to find a picture of her lying slit like a monstrous yellow chicken. But no, but no, but no.…

  I’d almost forgotten them when they returned this morning. He’s very old now, more like a doddering husband than a son. Baked gray clay he is, with milky blue eyes, a toothless mouth, and manicured fingernails which seem stronger because the flesh has baked away.

  At noon today, after a moment of standing out, a lone gray wingless hawk staring at a sky in which he had never soared or flown, he came inside and spoke to me, his voice rising.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” I said, scooping out his ice cream before he asked for it.

  “One of the maids just mentioned, your husband died five years ago! You should have told me!”

  “Well, now you know,” I said.

  He sat down slowly. “Lord,” he said, tasting the ice cream and savoring it, eyes shut, “this is bitter.” Then, a long time later, he said, “Anna, I never asked. Were there ever any children?”

  “No,” I said. “And I don’t know why. I guess I’ll never know why.”

  I left him sitting there and went to wash the dishes.

  At nine tonight I heard someone laughing by the lake. I hadn’t heard Roger laugh since he was a child, so I didn’t think it was him until the doors burst wide and he entered, flinging his arms about, unable to control his almost weeping hilarity.

  “Roger!” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing! Oh, nothing!” he cried. “Everything’s lovely! A root beer, Anna! Take one yourself! Drink with me!”

  We drank together, he laughed, winked, then got immensely calm. Still smiling, though, he looked suddenly, beautifully young.

  “Anna,” he whispered intensely, leaning forward, “guess what? I’m flying to China tomorrow! Then India! Then London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City!”

  “You are, Roger?”

  “I am,” he said. “I, I, I, not we, we, we, but I, Roger Bidwell Harrison, I, I, I!”

  I stared at him and he gazed quietly back at me, and I must have gasped. For then I knew what he had finally done tonight, this hour, within the last few minutes.

  Oh, no, my lips must have murmured.

  Oh, but yes, yes, his eyes upon me replied, incredible miracle of miracles, after all these waiting years. Tonight at last. Tonight.

  I let him talk. After Rome it was Vienna and Stockholm, he’d saved thousands of schedules, flight charts and hotel bulletins for forty years; he knew the moons and tides, the goings and comings of everything on the sea and in the sky.

  “But best of all,” he said at last, “Anna, Anna, will you come along with me? I’ve lots of money put away, don’t let me run on! Anna, tell me, will you?”

  I came around the counter slowly and saw myself in the mirror, a woman in her seventieth year going to a party half a century late.

  I sat down beside him and shook my head.


  “Oh, but, Anna, why not, there’s no reason why!”

  “There is a reason,” I said. “You.”

  “Me, but I don’t count!”

  “That’s just it, Roger, you do.”

  “Anna, we could have a wonderful time—”

  “I daresay. But, Roger, you’ve been married for seventy years. Now, for the first time, you’re not married. You don’t want to turn around and get married again right off, do you?”

  “Don’t I?” he asked, blinking.

  “You don’t, you really don’t. You deserve a little while, at least, off by yourself, to see the world, to know who Roger Harrison is. A little while away from women. Then, when you’ve gone around the world and come back, is time to think of other things.”

  “If you say so—”

  “No. It mustn’t be anything I say or know or tell you to do. Right now it must be you telling yourself what to know and see and do. Go have a grand time. If you can, be happy.”

  “Will you be here waiting for me when I come back?”

  “I haven’t it in me any more to wait, but I’ll be here.”

  He moved toward the door, then stopped and looked at me as if surprised by some new question that had come into his mind.

  “Anna,” he said, “if all this had happened forty, fifty years ago, would you have gone away with me then? Would you really have married me?”

  I did not answer.

  “Anna?” he asked.

  After a long while I said, “There are some questions that should never be asked.”

  Because, I went on, thinking, there can be no answers. Looking down the years toward the lake, I could not remember, so I could not say, whether we could have ever been happy. Perhaps even as a child, sensing the impossible in Roger, I had clenched the impossible, and therefore the rare, to my heart, simply because it was impossible and rare. He was a sprig of farewell summer pressed in an old book, to be taken out, turned over, admired, once a year, but more than that? Who could say? Surely not I, so long, so late in the day. Life is questions, not answers.

  Roger had come very close to read my face, my mind, while I thought all this. What he saw there made him look away, close his eyes, then take my hand and press it to his cheek.

  “I’ll be back. I swear I will!”

  Outside the door he stood bewildered for a moment in the moonlight, looking at the world and all its directions, east, west, north, south, like a child out of school for his first summer not knowing which way to go first, just breathing, just listening, just seeing.

  “Don’t hurry!” I said fervently. “Oh, God, whatever you do, please, enjoy yourself, don’t hurry!”

  I saw him run off toward the limousine near the cottage where I was supposed to rap in the morning and where I would get no answer. But I knew that I would not go to the cottage and that I’d keep the maids from going there because the old lady had given orders not to be bothered. That would give Roger the chance, the start he needed. In a week or two or three, I might call the police. Then if they met Roger coming back on the boat from all those wild places, it wouldn’t matter.

  Police? Perhaps not even them. Perhaps she died of a heart attack and poor Roger only thinks he killed her and now proudly sails off into the world, his pride not allowing him to know that only her own self-made death released him.

  But then again, if at last all the murder he had put away for seventy years had forced him tonight to lay hands on and kill the hideous turkey, I could not find it in my heart to weep for her but only for the great time it had taken to act out the sentence.

  The road is silent. An hour has passed since the limousine roared away down the road.

  Now I have just put out the lights and stand alone in the pavilion looking out at the shining lake where in another century, under another sun, a small boy with an old face was first touched to play tag with me and now, very late, had tagged me back, had kissed my hand and run away, and this time myself, stunned, not following.

  Many things I do not know, tonight.

  But one thing I’m sure of.

  I do not hate Roger Harrison any more.

  A Miracle of Rare Device

  On a day neither too mellow nor too tart, too hot nor too cold, the ancient tin lizzie came over the desert hill traveling at commotion speed. The vibration of the various armored parts of the car caused road-runners to spurt up in floury bursts of dust. Gila monsters, lazy displays of Indian jewelry, took themselves out of the way. Like an infestation, the Ford clamored and dinned away into the deeps of the wilderness.

  In the front seat, squinting back, Old Will Bantlin shouted, “Turn off!”

  Bob Greenhill spun-swung the lizzie off behind a billboard. Instantly both men turned. Both peered over the crumpled top of their car, praying to the dust they had wheeled up on the air.

  “Lay down! Lay low! Please…”

  And the dust blew slowly down. Just in time.

  “Duck!”

  A motorcycle, looking as if it had burned through all nine rings of hell, thundered by. Hunched over its oily handlebars, a hurricane figure, a man with a creased and most unpleasant face, goggled and sun-deviled, leaned on the wind. Roaring bike and man flung away down the road.

  The two old men sat up in their lizzie, exhaling.

  “So long, Ned Hopper,” said Bob Greenhill.

  “Why?” said Will Bantlin. “Why’s he always tailing us?”

  “Willy-William, talk sense,” said Greenhill. “We’re his luck, his Judas goats. Why should he let us go, when trailing us around the land makes him rich and happy and us poor and wise?”

  The two men looked at each other, half in, half out of their smiles. What the world hadn’t done to them, thinking about it had. They had enjoyed thirty years of nonviolence together, in their case meaning nonwork. “I feel a harvest coming on,” Will would say, and they’d clear out of town before the wheat ripened. Or, “Those apples are ready to fall!” So they’d stand back about three hundred miles so as not to get hit on the head.

  Now Bob Greenhill slowly let the car, in a magnificent controlled detonation, drift back out on the road.

  “Willy, friend, don’t be discouraged.”

  “I’ve been through ‘discouraged,’” said Will. “I’m knee deep in ‘accepting.’”

  “Accepting what?”

  “Finding a treasure chest of canned fish one day and no can opener. Finding a thousand can openers next day and no fish.”

  Bob Greenhill listened to the motor talking to itself like an old man under the hood, sounding like sleepless nights and rusty bones and well-worn dreams.

  “Our bad luck can’t last forever, Willy.”

  “No, but it sure tries. You and me sell ties and who’s across the street ten cents cheaper?”

  “Ned Hopper.”

  “We strike gold in Tonopah and who registers the claim first?”

  “Old Ned.”

  “Haven’t we done him a lifetime of favors? Aren’t we overdue for something just ours, that never winds up his?”

  “Time’s ripe, Willy,” said Robert, driving calmly. “Trouble is, you, me, Ned never really decided what we wanted. We’ve run through all the ghost towns, see something, grab. Ned sees and grabs, too. He don’t want it, he just wants it because we want it. He keeps it ‘till we’re out of sight, then tears it up and hang-dogs after us for more litter. The day we really know what we want is the day Ned gets scared of us and runs off forever. Ah, hell.” Bob Greenhill breathed the clear fresh-water air running in morning streams over the windshield. “It’s good anyway. That sky. Those hills. The desert and …”

  His voice faded.

  Will Bantlin glanced over. “What’s wrong?”

  “For some reason …” Bob Greenhill’s eyes rolled, his leathery hands turned the wheel slow, “we got to … pull off … the road.”

  The lizzie bumped on the dirt shoulder. They drove down in a dusty wash and up out and suddenly along a dry peninsula of
land overlooking the desert. Bob Greenhill, looking hypnotized, put out his hand to turn the ignition key. The old man under the hood stopped complaining about the insomnia and slept.

  “Now, why did you do that?” asked Will Bantlin.

  Bob Greenhill gazed at the wheel in his suddenly intuitive hands. “Seemed as if I had to. Why?” He blinked up. He let his bones settle and his eyes grow lazy. “Maybe only to look at the land out there. Good. All of it been here a billion years.”

  “Except for that city,” said Will Bantlin.

  “City?” said Bob.

  He turned to look and the desert was there and the distant hills the color of lions, and far out beyond, suspended in a sea of warm morning sand and light, was a kind of floating image, a hasty sketch of a city.

  “That can’t be Phoenix,” said Bob Greenhill. “Phoenix is ninety miles off. No other big place around.”

  Will Bantlin rumpled the map on his knees, searching.

  “No. No other town.”

  “It’s coming clearer!” cried Bob Greenhill, suddenly.

  They both stood absolutely straight up in the car and stared over the dusty windshield, the wind whining softly over their craggy faces.

  “Why, you know what that is, Bob? A mirage! Sure, that’s it! Light rays just right, atmosphere, sky, temperature. City’s the other side of the horizon somewhere. Look how it jumps, fades in and out. It’s reflected against that sky up there like a mirror and comes down here where we can see it! A mirage, by Gosh!”

  “That big?”

  Bob Greenhill measured the city as it grew taller, clearer in a shift of wind, a soft far whirlabout of sand.

  “The granddaddy of them all! That’s not Phoenix. Not Santa Fe or Alamagordo, no. Let’s see. It’s not Kansas City—”

  “That’s too far off, anyway.”

  “Yeah, but look at those buildings. Big! Tallest in the country. Only one place like that in the world.”

  “You don’t mean—New York?”