Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ could feel the wedding coming on like a high, an airy burning in the hollow of my stomach, and a high coming on from the pills. The future, which until then had been a single uniform field, began to collapse into a variety of irregular shapes, like the paths through a concrete garden. My hair was sitting strangely on my head, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Bonnie took my chin in her hand and stared into my eyes. I knew exactly what she was thinking. Beautiful, she said. Green is your color.

      The ceremony was in a Catholic church in a part of town that I’d never visited before; on the ride over there Bonnie sang Froggy Went A-Courtin’, all the way through. The sun was curled up in a ball in the heavens outside the window; I could see one or two planets, hovering and ducking into the clouds. Saturn, broad daylight. On the street, people were trying very hard not to stare at us. You never checked to see what those things were?

      It’ll get better as it settles, said Bonnie. You know, Adam is such a nice man, I’m so happy for him. He used to come in the bar just to sit nice, and drink some, and talk. In the distance I could see hills, they were the earth’s own joke. Do this, she said, taking her hands off the wheel for a moment and holding them in an attitude of prayer. I did that. We hope he stays married forever.

      In the church everyone was smiling, especially the preacher, who grinned so widely and constantly that I thought his head was going to come right off and float upward toward the sky beyond the steeple. At the front, just before the pulpit, there were two stands about waist-high: on each of them there was a large, shallow pot, and in each pot there was an arrangement of flowers. Between them stood the groom, tall, handsome, strong. The preacher was at a podium a few feet back, and behind him there was an organist. Several young saints were leaning modestly against the rear wall. They were all waiting for the bride, and the bride was waiting for the music. Her name was Marie.

      Bonnie and I slid into a pew near the back and sat down; she smiled at someone she recognized, and then leaned back and sighed nervously. I picked up a hymnal from the seat beside me, but I didn’t open it; I just held it in my hands, caressing the dimpled cover and weaving the thin purple ribbon in and out of my fingers.

      Roy and I were married in a dingy beige room at the city courthouse on a Wednesday afternoon, just behind a Cuban woman and her silent fiancé, and just ahead of two city sanitation workers who had their entire families along as witnesses. And did I believe that the flowers of paradise had descended upon us? I wasn’t looking at him when he said, I do. Everything seemed just right to me, and yet not quite right, somehow. What did I know? Afterward I exhaled hugely, and spent a very innocent night with my husband, whose skin under the dusky banner of our wedlock was somehow smoother and more polished, and whose shallow respiring, as he slept, was as steady and ceremonial as a command at sea. It had been two, three, four years since I’d lain down next to him and heard him breathe, but I remembered, and I remembered how much I’d loved the sound.

      The organist leaned forward and a few syrupy chords came down over the congregation; we all turned around in our seats to watch with open, expectant faces. The bride appeared at the door, a dark-skinned woman wearing a long lacy white dress and a white veil, arm in arm with her father. When I glanced back toward the altar I saw three or four other men ranged behind the groom, presenting him as one of their own. The preacher was one of them, too, but the bride was different, she was all alone, a precious and powerful little vial of perfume. When she reached the front she stopped; the music stopped and there was a hush in the room. The preacher said a few lines in a loud, hollow voice about the sacredness of the marriage bond; I didn’t think he really meant what the words said, but I knew there was something he meant very deeply by saying them. The bride and groom answered by promising that they would never give up what they had right there. Then she kissed him, and the kiss was long. I thought she was going to vanish, but when they were finished she was still standing by his side. It was a miracle, right there in the church, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed it; everyone was talking about how wonderful it had been, that she had been so suddenly transformed without coming apart.

      Afterward there were smiling faces bobbing in the vestibule of the church, holy expressions on the angels above the door, a few flashes of a photographer’s bulb on the front steps, some birds in the trees on the lawn. Bonnie checked her purse for the directions to the hall where the reception was to be held, and couldn’t find them. I know where they are, she said. They’re on my dresser at home. Hang on. She went over to a tall, dark man and spoke to him for a moment, and when she came back she was leading him with her hand around his wrist. This is Charlie, she said. He has the directions, so we’re going to give him a ride. This is my friend Caroline.

      Charlie had a smile like a handful of candy, and a low, slightly hoarse voice. He sat in the back and hung his head over the backrest that separated us. I wanted to touch his hair, his straight black hair, just to see what it felt like. I’ve never been down here before, he said. Adam moved down here, to Texas. It’s just like the movies, isn’t it? I came down from New York—he said the city’s name without blushing.—Oh, I think you have to take a right up at the intersection here, so you better get over. Do you want to just take this? He handed up the sheet of paper and as he leaned in I caught the smell of him for a moment, the heat of his clothes, skin, mouth: it went right down the front of my dress like the memory of a man’s hand, and I flushed, shifted slightly, and cracked the window.

      Bonnie pursed her lips and turned half around. Can you get down there, or move over, so I can see out the back?

      Of course. I’m sorry, he said, and the smell went with him.

      What are you doing out there? she asked, and then turned to me and gave me a smile.

      I’m just working for the government.

      A spy? said Bonnie hopefully.

      In the mayor’s office.

      At that my throat closed, and I looked at my legs so that I’d have something to see that wasn’t going to show my face back. Bonnie drove innocently through a stop sign. Hm, she said. So what’s the mayor’s office like?

      It’s all right, Charlie said. Great, actually, it’s disgusting. I love it, it’s great.

      I turned around in my seat to look at him, and he smiled at me, but his eyes were dark. I had no idea why: he was a big man and I wasn’t prepared for him to start getting complicated, too. As for me, I felt doomed: my skin had become a composition of hot and cold layers, which were shifting against each other and making me red. Bonnie said, VFW, right? This must be it.

      The room was large and high-ceilinged, and the floor was swept wood scarred with a thousand heel marks. We were late and the place was already full of milling guests. High blood, each right hand holding a glass of ruby wine, a wedding.—Of course, Charlie was saying to Bonnie, and then the bridge collapsed from the weight of all those people. Don’t drink anything, she said to me, and she squeezed my arm to mark the thought. Not with what I gave you. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I sat for a while in my green dress.

      A little later I saw Bonnie in a circle on the other side of the room, looking up into the faces around her, her small smile a star to wish on. Inside its vaporous halo I could vaguely see Roy, the divorced man, sitting at a desk in a government office down on Park Row, his narrow shoulders bent as he leaned over a stack of papers in front of him. He wasn’t thinking about me.

      Are you all right over here? Charlie asked. He was sitting back in the chair next to me, with the side of his knee very gently pressed against mine. If he was flirting with me, I was impressed; if he wasn’t, I wasn’t going to show a thing.

      Yes, fine, I said. Then, and very deliberately, I set my face into a casual mask and tested the effect. What made you move to New York? I asked. It seemed to work well, and I was so pleased with СКАЧАТЬ