A Garden Of Earthly Delights Part 30

She took hold of his head and shook it hard. Clark seemed to be working his way up through a heavy, warm pressure of water. He woke suddenly to see Clara bent over him. Behind her was the clear night sky and the moon, just a chunk of the moon, and he wondered why she looked so worried. He reached out and his elbow just brushed the horn-it almost made a sound-and he took hold of her. "Don't be so mad," he said sleepily. He pressed his face against her. Clara made a noise that might have been a surprised laugh, then she pushed against his forehead with her hand. "You're real nice," Clark muttered. "Wait-don't-"

He shut his eyes tight and held her. His mind stumbled backward away from this woman standing here in her half-open bathrobe and her bare feet to that earlier, younger Clara who had come home one day with his father. Just a girl. For years he had heard about her and one crazy time he had even gone all the way over to her house, risking everything, that whip of his father's or worse, just to stand by her windows and try to look in.... Now he had hold of her and dreamily, dizzily, he thought that he would never give her up. It seemed to him that he had struggled a long way to get to her.

"You're crazy, let go," she whispered. Clark pulled her down and tried to kiss her. He felt her hesitating-he was sure of that-and then she dug into his neck with her fingernails. "You son of a b.i.t.c.h, let go! Let go!" she said. Clark fell backward but did not really fall: he was still sitting in the car.

The next morning, before Mandy made up breakfast, Clara called him out into her "garden room." She was already dressed. Her hair had been pulled back, skinned back, and fastened with pins. On her right hand was the old purple ring she hadn't worn for years. Clark started to tell her how sorry he was, how miserable he was. "Yes," Clara said. She did not seem to be listening. Nor did she seem to be looking at him, exactly. "What you have to do is get out of here. You know that. You can't stay in the same house with me now."

"All right," Clark said.

"You just can't," she said, and her face, caught in the morning light that flooded the windows, was not the face he had loved and wanted the night before-there were fine feathery lines on her forehead and by her mouth. She was still a beautiful woman but the woman he had wanted was gone now anyway: that young girl Revere had brought home to marry.

"Do you understand?" she said. Her gaze was flattened and remote, like a cat's gaze. Then it sharpened upon him and he could see that she was a little frightened. She tapped at his arm and then let her fingers rest. "I'm sorry you did it. I didn't know-I never- But you can't stay here now. Go and marry her and that's that."

Clark bent to hear her better. "Marry who?" he said politely.

10.

On Swan's eighteenth birthday he rode in with his father to Hamilton, where they met Clara and had dinner at a hotel restaurant. Clara visited the city often, usually staying in a hotel, but this time she was at a relative's house. When Revere asked her what she did she was pleased and vague, explaining she had to shop, had to check out stores, had to see people. It was not clear whom she saw, but Revere did not ask. He distrusted his city relatives; he thought they looked down on him.

Revere had come in for important business-his aunt's estate was being settled. Swan was disturbed by his father's tired, haggard look. The waiters looked at him as if he were an impressive kind of ruin, a man they ought to know but could not quite place. Revere mistook his waiter's solicitousness for something else. "Do they want to hurry us out of here, and we just came in?" he asked Clara.

Swan had no appet.i.te. He had been listening to relatives arguing all day. But he opened his menu and looked at the words, which he tried not to translate into images of food. Clara said, just as he knew she would, "They're having Judd and his wife out to dinner, but not us. I know it." Swan expelled his breath to show how foolish this idea was; he wanted to stop Clara before she aroused Revere's anger. "They knew it was Steven's birthday but what the h.e.l.l? Anything they can do to hurt me, they do it."

"They're busy, it's a lot of work," Revere said.

He closed his menu. He was over sixty now: a heavy, slack man with sharp bruiselike furrows on either side of his nose. He had a fixed, rather indifferent stare when he did not wear his gla.s.ses. Opening his napkin, shaking it out, he glanced down at it as if he had no idea what it was. Then he put it in his lap. They watched him, Swan and Clara, their eyes drawn heavily to him. For a while he said nothing, his face was hard and austere as a mask; then his lips began to tremble. He said, "Don't worry, they'll be sorry. I know how to get back at them."

"Yes, but you won't," Clara said.

He shook his head slowly, gravely. Swan felt cold. All afternoon he had had to sit by his father and hear his father's slowed-down, groping voice, his meandering off onto obscure and foolish problems, and he felt exhausted.

He was exhausted all the time now and never could he locate the core of his trouble. When he had still been seeing Loretta he had had these moments of unaccountable, terrifying exhaustion, as if a pair of great wings were pounding against the walls of his brain and had been pounding for so long that everything was going numb, dying. Unfolding his napkin, moving his silverware nervously and needlessly around, he thought of Loretta and wondered what she was doing. What he had last heard about her was nothing surprising-marriage, a baby. Loretta. He kept mixing her up in his mind now with Clark's wife, whom he saw occasionally. But Loretta had been his girl. Narrowing his eyes, he tried to avoid Clara's look and retreated to the secret contemplation of Loretta, who had loved him and had never once been able to talk to him, not once. That last night they had lain together in his car and he had been dizzy with wanting her, a real physical agony he had hardly been able to control, and when she said, "It's all right, Steven," he had prayed in his mind to G.o.d, who he understood did not exist and never had, begging: "Let me just be good and kind. I want to be good. I don't want anything else." Loretta had drawn him down to her with her arms and her sweet soft mouth. Never had he said the word "love" to her and he had not said it then-but he had almost thought it-and at the nearness of that thought he recoiled from her, trembling. He was terrified of sinking into that swamp with her. He was not going to drown in her body. Because there was no sweet mild world they shared without consequence: they were Swan and Loretta, two real people, and anything he did to her would not dissolve out and away as if in a dream. It would be real. It would involve them together forever.

"You won't hurt me," she had said.

But it was nothing like what Clara had promised-how strange and simple, how cruel his mother was! You didn't make girls happy in that simple way; they wanted and needed more, and if you couldn't give them anything more?

So he had stayed free of her and he had forced her to become free of him. And Clara had said, hearing it was all over: "Well, I'm just as glad. She was sort of trash anyway, wasn't she?"

Now Clara was shedding the cold haughty look she always wore into stores and restaurants, and as she read the menu a childish, cunning look came onto her face. Swan watched her in fascination. "Oh, this looks good. It isn't too expensive, is it?" she said. She pointed to something and showed it to Revere; he shook his head no, it wasn't too expensive. Swan smiled. He did not know what his smile meant: just the reaction of witnessing rituals, ceremonies that have been repeated many times. Clara always did this. He wondered if she did it with the other men she met here in the city-if she met other men; she was secretive now, in a vague sloppy way- and if they shook their heads, no, in the same way Revere did. When Clara moved her head, slivers of light darted off her diamond earrings. Yes, they were diamond. They weren't rhinestone. But how could most people tell the difference?

That was one of the things that bothered her these days.

"Have anything you want, Clara," Revere said.

They could relax in the shadow of this man and what he had done for them. Swan tried to think of Revere as his father, his father father, and though the idea of Clara being his mother should have been harder for him to accept, still he could not quite understand what it meant to have a father. What did it mean, exactly? How was he to behave toward this man? He imitated any models he came across- he had been imitating and improving upon Clark's style for years- but at the very heart of their relations.h.i.+p was a sense of dry and forlorn emptiness across which father and son might contemplate each other forever. As Swan was more and more able to understand Revere's problems, his role was becoming simpler in one direction and more complex in another. He was turning into a kind of clerk or secretary. Or a kind of lawyer. Already he had spent time with one of his father's new men-his tax accountant-trying to explain to the man why Revere refused to pay certain things and agreeing yes, yes, it was irrational, but how were they going to get it paid without Revere knowing? The older Revere got, the more crucial it was that the game he played not be violated. He demanded to be fooled, lied to, misled. Swan believed that the people who worked with and for him knew this, but if they didn't, he, Swan, knew it and they would have to listen to him. There were certain things one could tell the old man, certain reports one gave him and others one did not. This was getting simpler because all he had to do was transform himself into a kind of machine to master it. But being Revere's only remaining son was getting more difficult. Robert was never mentioned, Jonathan had vanished out of their lives, and Clark was discussed in the way Revere had always discussed obscure relatives who had failed ... so that left Swan-Steven-and it wasn't enough just to play chess with the old man and let him win; the old man was getting bored with winning chess. It was becoming necessary to nudge him a little to correct him, before he made a catastrophic blunder and lost everything. Swan thought of how simple everything might be if only his father would die, but the thought was a shameful one.

His father ordered drinks for himself and Clara. Back over Clara's shoulder was a wall mirror framed by a tacky red velvet drape, and Swan tried to avoid seeing himself in it. His mother's hair had been cut the other day, apparently, radically cut so that it hugged her head and crept in alarming bunches of curls up to the crown of her head, urged up there by some kind of trickery. Swan could not decide if she looked good or ludicrous. She could be both at the same time, maybe.

"Steven, you should have ordered a drink too. It's your birthday," Revere said.

"I don't like to drink."

Revere considered this as if he had never heard it before. There were wedges beneath his eyes-dark, tired pouches. He looked like a man who is thinking constantly, thinking painfully. Swan and his mother were light-skinned, light-haired, and curiously supple and casual beside this impressive old man; to a pa.s.serby the relations.h.i.+p among the three of them would be quite obscure. Swan thought: G.o.d knows I don't like to drink. If I got started drinking I might not ever stop. He wished that he could tell this to his father and throw all the blame for it onto that man's lap.

"Bessie looks sort of old," Clara said.

"Does she!" Revere said. "Well."

"I thought so. Ronald is in Europe, did you hear? Studying in Copenhagen-neurology."

The way Clara enunciated "Copenhagen"-"neurology"-you would think she said them every day. Swan smiled. "Ah, Steven," she said, a little sharply, seeing that smile, "you should have kept on with school. Why let them get ahead of you? He isn't much older than you are."

Swan shrugged. A negligent and self-derisive movement of his shoulders perfected by Jonathan in those days of the drive to school, and back. "I had enough of studying. Books."

"But why?" It was Clara's saddest disappointment: Swan's indifference about going to college. Valedictorian of his graduating cla.s.s, and he hadn't gotten around to completing applications to any university until it was too late for the year. Vaguely Swan said he could go to college in a few years, maybe.

"Steven, you always loved to read so...."

"Well, I don't any longer. My brain is burnt out."

Swan laughed, and Clara stared at him. How strange her son was becoming to her! She was growing fearful of him, almost. He was reminding her of someone, Swan sensed. "If I had the chance to learn things, and wasn't so stupid," Clara said, tapping at her teeth with her fingernails, "I would be so proud. I would! All my life there have been people around me-like in the newspapers, and on the radio-the Reveres in Hamilton-who are smarter than I am, and can talk better. I always wished I could see into the past like some people. Like at that museum, remember? 'Ancient Egypt.' 'Pharaohs.' History, things that have happened for a reason. And these people, they can understand life. But me, I ... I never could." Clara faltered and Swan felt a stab of something like pity, sorrow, wonder: What was his mother trying to say, whom was she thinking about?

"Well, I don't have time for books now. Like I said, my brain is like a lightbulb, burnt out." Swan thought with satisfaction that he was safe from the ma.s.sive crammed shelves of libraries and the high-ceilinged rooms of museums, so much demanding to be read, known, stared at, absorbed-that vast garden of men's minds that seemed to him to have been toiled into its complex existence by a sinister and inhuman spirit.

Revere said, "I never went to college. None of us did. Why? You need a 'moneyman'-you buy him. Same thing with a lawyer."

Swan smiled across the table and into his mother's occluded gaze. So? You see? That's wisdom. You didn't really want for me to get past him, did you? Wasn't it enough for me to be equal to him? And so much younger?

That night, lying in the strange hotel room, he cast his mind about for something that would let him sleep. He thought of his cousin Deborah, whom he had last seen at Christmas-a big Christmas party at Clara's. Not a successful party, not quite, but maybe the relatives had eaten more than in other years, stayed later, maybe they had been more friendly, and Clara was obviously willing to wait any number of Christmases to bring them around to the point at which they would embrace both her and Swan-she could wait forever, this Clara Walpole! Deborah had come but probably she had wanted to stay home. He watched her all during the meal, sitting next to her father but not even talking to him, a thin, shy, haughty girl with long brown hair and brown eyes. She looked as if she might be stupid until her eyes moved upon you, then you felt something strange.... After the long, loud dinner Swan sat by her and talked. They were alongside the Christmas tree, almost behind it by the window, and outside it had been snowing; he remembered all this. The snow was gentle and peaceful, but inside children were running, shouting-he hated them. Swan told her about going to the city with his father, trying to make her feel some of his confusion, his worry, without exactly telling her.

But she interrupted to say, "I hate your mother, do you know that?"

Swan was stunned. "You what?"

"I hate my own mother too. So it's all right."

She looked up at him and smiled. There was something unreal about her gaze: she was too young to be staring at him like that.

"Tell the truth, Steven! You hate both of them yourself."

"No."

Slyly she poked him. "Come on."

"I hardly know your mother. And why should I hate my own mother?"

Deborah's face s.h.i.+fted into an expression of contempt. "You know the truth but you don't speak it, so why should I talk to you? If you loved me and respected me ..." Swan was embarra.s.sed, and said nothing; they lapsed into silence. After a moment Deborah said meanly, "You're what is called a 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' 'Illegitimate.' Your mother and father weren't married when you were born. So why should you tell lies like everybody else, all these hypocrites? You're from the outside, everyone knows it. You You can speak the truth." can speak the truth."

"No. I'm not from the outside," Swan said. "I'm Curt Revere's son."

He had an impulse to take hold of Deborah, to hurt her. But the impulse pa.s.sed quickly. He could not hurt her, he loved her; and if he didn't love her, he could not love anyone else. She was his sister-self. Yet with her, he had to pretend. "What you say isn't true, Deborah. So shut up."

Thinking now of that girl, on the verge of sleep, and wondering why, like him, she was so unhappy, and undefined; so like himself, but a Revere. Even her clothes looked old, of a bygone era, and they never seemed quite to fit her slender body, as if they'd belonged to someone else. We could leave here. Live somewhere else. Europe. Alaska. Mexico. Deborah! We could leave here. Live somewhere else. Europe. Alaska. Mexico. Deborah! In his half-sleep he imagined making love to Deborah but before he could kiss her mouth, before he could enter her body, she faded and was gone. In his half-sleep he imagined making love to Deborah but before he could kiss her mouth, before he could enter her body, she faded and was gone.

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On his twentieth birthday Swan was also away from home: in Chicago with Revere to meet with "moneymen." And that summer he spent weeks in Hamilton, staying in a hotel; meeting with his father's people, and quarreling; threatening them with actions Revere himself had not thought of, yet were belligerent enough to be an old man's ideas. Selling property. Selling investments. "Pulling out." Reinvesting. The Eden County Reveres were making a good deal of money on wheat, corn, soybeans because of government tariffs on imports, and what did Revere care if other interests weren't yielding nearly so much? Swan wanted to think it wasn't just the federal government, laws pa.s.sed by Congress as a result of lobbying, bribery. The future was automated farming, like factories; except the products were to be eaten. Except, if you were smart, your workers weren't unionized, and could be fired with a few days' pay. The biggest U.S. companies could be broken by strikes, but not Revere-owned farms. Not yet.

When Swan was twenty-two he took his father up on the threat of buying out the partners.

"What are you waiting for, Pa? They're just laughing at you."

"Like h.e.l.l they are. They'll change their minds when ..."

Swan closed his eyes. "You've been talking about this for ten years."

His brain swerved and plunged past his father's. He was a young horse cruelly yoked to an aging horse. Forced to hobble his pace to match the other's. He had his own ideas, he knew what he wanted to do. In his mind was a land surveyor's map of the countryside from the Eden Valley north into Hamilton. Clearly he could see it intersected by a new highway; an interstate highway larger than any road that had yet been built in upstate New York. This was the future, he knew. He would purchase more land, always more land, and he would rebuild and expand the barns; tear down the old-style silos and build new ones, weatherproof. He would buy into a frozen foods company for that too was the future. He was feverish thinking of all he might do; the thought of so much power lying latent in the mute, brute land, waiting for someone to seize it. Clara was right: you needed to know what the past was. But you needed to know only to plunge into the future.

Swan had overseen the sale of the gypsum plant. He'd have liked to bail out on the Tintern lumberyard but Clark, d.a.m.n dumb slow-witted Clark who hadn't had an idea in his head in his life, ran it.

Swan told Revere that the only one of the relatives he trusted was Judd. He spoke slowly and clearly so that Revere, frowning, turning his bifocal gla.s.ses in his hands, would not misunderstand. "It's taken me five years to realize that you distrust them but you continue to work with them-why? Uncle Judd can maneuver them out. We'll buy them out, and the h.e.l.l with them. And if Uncle Judd doesn't want to do it, I'll convince him. I think I know how."

Revere's stern little line of a mouth smiled slightly.

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"How strange you are now. Sometimes I don't know you."

Yet Clara spoke half-admiringly. She knew to keep her distance. Swan laughed, his mother was so fanciful. Yet it was true, maybe. Even when shaving, he avoided seeing his face. Without knowing it he'd perfected a means of shaving that involved gazing only at his jaws, through part-shut eyes. Seeing no more of himself than he needed.

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It became a time then when Swan was intoxicated with all he'd inherited-he could sit at the window of the third-floor room he'd commandeered as his office, and stare at nothing; not even out the window at the land that had once so enthralled him, foothills, mountains, much of it Revere property. Figures, speculations danced in his head. They lived at the center of activity, and production: REVERE FARM had become a model farm of the New Era: barns rebuilt and humming with efficiency, like factories; dairy cows milked by machines and not fumbling human fingers; hundreds of acres of wheat ripening toward harvest. Swan could feel his heart the beating heart of the farm, and the range of his desire, scanning the horizon as far as he could see, was the measure of what they would someday attain. "They." He liked to think that he was lifting them all with him, all the Reveres; those long-deceased men and women who'd loved and hated one another so fiercely, bound together by a single name and committed to living out the drama of that name. The lush, fertile countryside through which the Eden River coursed north to Lake Ontario had first been settled in the early 1700s, and by the time of the Revolution, the first Reveres had arrived. And now- Then Swan would wake from his trance and think, What am I doing?

He was not one of them. He cared nothing for them.

He could leave it all, even now. Walk away.

But his mind flooded with figures, speculations, rumors, theories. Steven Revere was not the only young Revere with ambition and plans. There were others in his generation, and one of them the fat-faced cousin with the Harvard degree: Swan's rival, you could say.

They spoke by telephone, solely. They never met.

The telephone was Swan's instrument, sparing him face-to-face meetings with people he disliked. There was still a residue of shyness in him: Clara's towheaded son. Now he rarely read anything except newspapers and financial news; if he listened to the radio, it was to financial news. Rarely did he walk out onto the farm as Revere still did, and yet more rarely did he enter the barns, the stables. He scarcely knew the horses' names, and which foals belonged to which mares. There was a farm manager, and the manager had a.s.sistants. Swan was spared, and would be spared. He'd long ago realized in himself an unnerving weakness-a mystical sort of love-for this inherited land, that was almost a terror in his blood. "The land"-a fine gauzelike scrim occluded his vision, the way the information packed into print, into books, had once threatened to invade his brain and leave him powerless. All knowledge is a drug, Swan believed. And all drugs can be addictive.

He would fight it. He knew how. He'd isolated it-this sensation, as of imminent helplessness-as the way in which a fetus grows in its mother's belly: tiny head taking form, tiny arms, legs, torso, fish-body becoming human; sucking its energy from the encasing flesh and growing, always growing. Mysteriously growing. If he knew where this demonic energy came from, he would know the secret to all things.

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It was about this time that he bought a pistol and carried it with him when he drove into the city. When he walked about the city streets alone he liked to let his hand rest on it, in his pocket, knowing that it possessed a power that he did not. Thinking I am armed now, I am ready. I am armed now, I am ready. Swan smiled at the strangeness of such comfort: his heart beat with less strain. Swan smiled at the strangeness of such comfort: his heart beat with less strain.

The only time Swan left the handgun in his car, locked in the glove compartment, was when he picked up a woman somewhere and took her back to his hotel: one of those young women sitting conspicuously alone in bars, positioned so that winking neon lights, reflected from the street outside, softened and made their faces alluring. They might have been salesclerks, office workers, nurse's aides and not prost.i.tutes, or anyway not exclusively prost.i.tutes, available without the intervention of a pimp. If Swan sensed a male presence, Swan retreated. He was filled with a moral repugnance for such a transaction, he could not bear it. The women he encountered were friendly-seeming, hopeful that he would "like" them. He knew, and he paid them money in excess of anything they might have asked, because money was the means by which he kept them from him.

What he feared, if he'd been drinking: that, overcome with pa.s.sion or anguish, exhausted as if he'd run a great distance to their anonymous and malleable bodies, he might confess to them that he did not know what his life was, what he was doing, where he'd come from, or why his brain pounded with desires he could not comprehend. Always he was running-toward running-toward, yet at the same time running-away running-away as in a dream gone bad. "I hurt my brother once. One of my brothers. It was an accident. Yet I did it on purpose." He was fearful of uttering such words in the lulling intimacy of s.e.x; in the false intimacy of s.e.x; in the brainless aftermath of s.e.x. He was fearful of uttering words he could not retract. And of plunging onward saying he was a killer who had not completed his work and was waiting for his final deed to rise up within him. as in a dream gone bad. "I hurt my brother once. One of my brothers. It was an accident. Yet I did it on purpose." He was fearful of uttering such words in the lulling intimacy of s.e.x; in the false intimacy of s.e.x; in the brainless aftermath of s.e.x. He was fearful of uttering words he could not retract. And of plunging onward saying he was a killer who had not completed his work and was waiting for his final deed to rise up within him.

He was frightened of these women yet returned repeatedly to them whenever he was in the city. Away from the valley, Steven Revere was not Curt Revere's son. Nor Clara Walpole's son: how furious Clara would be, to know of Swan's secret, s.e.xual life! He smiled to think of the revenge he was taking, even if it was revenge upon himself, too. Saying, one night, to a girl he'd met in a Hamilton c.o.c.ktail lounge and with whom he spent several hours: "How do you keep going with your life? I mean, how do you keep living?" It was a serious question and the girl considered it seriously yet finally she laughed and said, "It's how I am."

He was astonished at this reply. At the simplicity and sincerity of this reply. He thought of the long afternoon in the Hamilton library, and of waiting for his mother outside on the stone steps in the wind. A b.i.t.c.h she was. A wh.o.r.e. Even a child knows. And recalling Clara later that evening as Swan lay listless on his bed, how his mother had spoken to him in her rapid soft dazed voice of how happy she was, and how she deserved happiness; and he had believed that this was so, Clara deserved happiness, yet at the same time he knew she must be punished, and he alone was the instrument of punishment.

"Is something wrong? Did I say something wrong?" the girl asked, seeing Swan's face.

Female pleading. You were meant to respond protectively, yet you wanted to lash out, to hit and to hurt.

He left her abruptly, shaking with an anger he did not understand. In his car unlocking the glove compartment and seeing, yes to his relief the pistol was there, that mute and not-heavy object that fitted with such ease and logic in the grip of a man's hand.

Explain to that girl what he'd done, and had not yet completed. What he and Clara had done. Explain, and she would not have cared. It's how you are. We are. It's how you are. We are. How close he'd come to hurting her, she could not have known. How close he'd come to hurting her, she could not have known.

11.

In Hamilton, in a hotel into which he'd checked under the name Walpole Walpole, he ran his finger idly along the listings of Physicians & Surgeons in the local directory. The name Piggott Piggott struck him. He called to make an appointment. struck him. He called to make an appointment.

The Hamilton Reveres had their physicians and surgeons, you could be sure. Their favored hospital. When one of them was stricken by illness, they purchased the very best medical attention.

If Piggott, E. H., practice limited to internal medicine Piggott, E. H., practice limited to internal medicine, had an opening late that afternoon, Swan guessed that Piggott, E. H. Piggott, E. H., was not likely to be one of the Reveres' physicians. He was grateful that, as the breathy receptionist informed him, she could "fit him into" the doctor's schedule.

An office on the eleventh floor of one of the older downtown buildings, a few blocks from the lake that was choppy and no-color beneath a glazed-looking sky. Swan had had one of his blanked-out nights, the previous day. Was it the weekend? He guessed not, since Piggott had office hours. And others in this building had office hours.

In Piggott's waiting room were several other patients. Swan was disconcerted: somehow, he hadn't imagined other people. He hadn't imagined waiting.

He gave his Walpole name to the receptionist. He was ten minutes early for his five-fifteen appointment. He sat, restless and edgy. Picked up an old Time Time to leaf through, without interest. The financial news would be not new, and so without value. Other features- politics, films, books-were of no interest to him. "Mister?"-the child was perhaps four years old. His mother was a woman of about Swan's age, maybe older, with a sad, hardened face; she wore a dress of slovenly glamour, and oddly dressy high-heeled shoes. Swan had only glanced at her when he'd entered the waiting room, and he had not noticed her child at all. "Mister? Hiya." to leaf through, without interest. The financial news would be not new, and so without value. Other features- politics, films, books-were of no interest to him. "Mister?"-the child was perhaps four years old. His mother was a woman of about Swan's age, maybe older, with a sad, hardened face; she wore a dress of slovenly glamour, and oddly dressy high-heeled shoes. Swan had only glanced at her when he'd entered the waiting room, and he had not noticed her child at all. "Mister? Hiya."

The greeting-"Hiya"-was uttered in a solemn tone. Swan smiled, and said, "Hiya" in return. He was surprised that the little boy was so soft-spoken, and so beautiful: his skin was pale and smooth as a doll's rubber skin, poreless, perfect; his lips reminded Swan of the lips of children in cla.s.sical paintings, children who weren't meant to be human but of divine origin. Baby Christs, cherubs. "Want one?" The boy held out a roll of Life Savers to Swan, opened at one end. Across the room, seated uncomfortably in a plastic hard-backed chair, the boy's mother was smiling at Swan.

She's got her kid to pimp for her.

"No thanks," Swan said.