Love & Sleep by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley [CROWLEY, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC024000, FIC009000
ISBN: 9781468304411
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

“Love,” said Val the Faraways astrologer to Rosie Rasmussen, and held out a fried-chicken wing to Rosie’s daughter Sam, who shook her head. “If they were making up the houses of the Zodiac now, there would have to be one house that’s the House of Love.”

“There isn’t?” Rosie said.

“No. It’s amazing.” Val stripped the meat from the wing herself with one practiced motion of fingers and teeth as Sam watched wide-eyed. “There’s Nati, that’s the fifth house, and that’s the House of Children basically: it sort of includes sex, or at least procreation, but it’s got to cover wills and legacies and inheritance too. And there’s Uxor, the seventh house, the Wife. Marriage, and partnership, and like relationships. But hey, I don’t have to tell you: that’s just not quite love.”

“Hm,” said Rosie. Rosie was a single mother, in the process of getting divorced from Sam’s father.

“But love is what everybody wants to know about. After money and health. No before money, anyway if they’re young. Love is oh Christ half my business. And there’s not really a House of Love. Weird, huh?”

Rosie examined the Pu Pu Platter she and Sam and Val were sharing for lunch, and chose a fried dumpling. “Weird,” she said. But in fact she didn’t herself just then see the need, or feel the press of questions about love and the prospect of love that needed answering. It was true, what Val said, that it was a big question for most people, but it had ceased to be one for Rosie. She felt herself to be (though she hadn’t always been) outside or beyond the preoccupation, as she was outside other things that occupied lots of people—oh sports, or politics.

It wasn’t the same, though.

“So there’s houses of health and money?” she asked.

“Sure,” Val said. “Lucrum is all about money and property and stuff. And Valetudo, the sixth house, is about Sickness. Diseases. So is Mors: that’s Death.”

“How about politics? Sports?”

Val drew back her head, affronted, the wingbone still held between thumb and medicus. “You trying to make a farce out of this?”

“We have sports in my house,” Sam said, nodding.

“Yes?” Val said.

“In my ode house.”

“Oh. Hey, okay.”

“Her old house,” Rosie said. “Some kids have imaginary friends. She has an imaginary old house. The house where she used to live, she says. She always had it. Since she could talk.”

“Well sure,” said Val. “So do you, if you could only remember it.”

Rosie tried to explain about love. “As though it were all happening someplace else, somewhere I’m not—as though I’m seeing it all through a screen or a glass, and I can’t hear very well. And what I do hear makes me afraid. Like football: I don’t know how it’s played, and everybody roars with excitement, into it, and I feel like I’m the only one who thinks it’s just dangerous and somebody’s going to get killed.”

“Well is it real surprising?” Val said gently. “When you’ve just gone through what you’ve gone through? I mean Christ.”

Of course that made sense.

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