The Lights of Earth by Gina Berriault

Author:Gina Berriault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

12

Uncertain about which door was the right one, someone was bungling along the landing, knocking at all of them. The dog inside the apartment next to Ilona’s clawed at the door, banging against it, and its bellowing bark caused the walls of her room to vibrate. Then the caller knocked at her door.

“Ah, it’s you,” Claud said, surprised he had found her. “I want you to join me in an act of supreme cruelty. You remember Jerome, our host? If not his name at least his suffering face? We’re going out to the ocean and we’re going to make a bonfire and we’re going to burn his manuscript. His only one, that one about his wife and Neely in the coils of a boa constrictor passion.”

One second of perverse pleasure—it sprang so fast to her eyes she had no way of concealing it from him. If all those pages, all those years of labor were to go up in smoke, then the woman herself might end up unremembered, her life unknown.

“That’s an awful thing to do,” she said, “burning up all that labor,” her dismay as true as that shameful pleasure a moment ago.

“It’s cold out there at the ocean,” he warned. “Dress warm.”

“I don’t want to see him.”

She wanted to back away, close the door. They were two of a kind, herself and that husband. There was a shame about them both for their fear of loss and for the loss that had come about.

“Oh, but he looks great. He’s skinny and he’s got a haircut and he’s wearing suits again, and he’s got himself a big desk in the trust department at the Bank of America or Bank of the Cosmos. One little thing left to do, burn up his obsession, and he’ll soar like a big pink flamingo.”

He found her raincoat and held it up for her and she slipped it on. At the foot of the stairs he took out a black knit cap from his jacket pocket, a watch-cap like the one he was wearing, and drew it over her head, down to the eyebrows.

“You and me,” he said. “I’m the executioner and you’re the priest. Say a prayer over the ashes.”

The time was midafternoon, but their host was lying asleep on Claud’s bed. He sat up, hampered by the blankets over him, struggling up from the exhaustion that precedes an act of finality. Ilona would not have recognized him in a crowd. He was somebody else or more truly himself than on the night of his party. His face, that night, must have been padded with hope that everything would stay the same, the tolerable same, despite the man up in the air.

Claud pushed a chair firmly against the backs of her knees. “Sit down, sit down.” And to the host, “Sit up, sit up. I’ll brew something bitter.”

Jerome sat on the edge of the bed, head down. “How’ve you been?” he asked his shoes.

“I’ve been fine,” she said.

“Me too.”

She had wanted never to see this man again.

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