The Blue Guitar Read online

  Gloria asked where I had been all night, not to accuse or complain, but absently, almost. I can’t remember what lie I told her. Maybe I told her the truth. It would hardly have mattered, if I had, and probably she wouldn’t have heard me, anyway.

  What I want to know, and can’t know, is this: Was she aware that she was dying, our daughter? The question haunts me. I tell myself she couldn’t have known—surely at that age a child has no clear idea of what it is to die. Yet sometimes she had a look, distant, preoccupied, gently dismissive of all around her, the look that people have when they are about to set off on a long and arduous journey, their minds already off in that distant elsewhere. She had certain absences, too, certain intermittences, when she would become very still and seem to be trying to listen to something, to make out something immensely far-off and faint. When she was like that there was no talking to her: her face would go slack and vacant, or she would turn aside brusquely, impatient of us and our noisiness, our fake cheerfulness, our soft, useless hectoring. Am I making too much of all this? Am I giving it a spuriously portentous weight? I hope I am. I would wish she had gone blithely unaware into that darkness.

  I could have told Marcus, there in the awful place that used to be Maggie Mallon’s, could have told him about the child, about the night she died. I could have told him about Anneliese, too. It would have been some sort of confession, and the idea of me in bed with a girl might have jogged him enough to make him see the immediate thing he wasn’t seeing, the real thing that I should have been confessing to. I would have been relieved, I think, had he guessed what I was keeping from him, though only in the sense of being relieved of an awkward and chafing burden—I mean, it wouldn’t have made me feel better, only less loaded down. I certainly wouldn’t have expected catharsis, much less exoneration. Catharsis, indeed. Anyway, I said nothing. When we left the Fisher King my unconsoled friend muttered a quick goodbye and walked off with his hands plunged in his pockets and his shoulders sloped, the very picture of dejection. I stood a minute and watched him go, then I too turned away. The weather had changed yet again, and the day was clear and sharp now with a quicksilver wind blowing. Season of fall, season of memory. I didn’t know where to go. Home was out of the question—how could I look Gloria in the eye, after all that had passed between Marcus and me? One of the things I’ve learned about illicit love is that it never feels so real, so serious and so gravely precious as at those moments of breathless peril when it seems about to be discovered. If Marcus were to tell Gloria what he had told me, and Gloria were to put two and two together—or one and one, more accurately—and come to a conclusion and confront me with it, I would break down on the spot and confess all. I could lie to Gloria only by omission.

  There was something in my pocket, I took it out and looked at it. I had pinched a salt cellar from the restaurant table, without noticing. Without even noticing! That will show you the state I was in.

  I set off for the studio, having nowhere else to go. The wind was shivering the puddles, turning them to discs of pitted steel.

  Someone, Marcus had said, someone: so I was safe, so far, in my anonymity. I felt as if I had fallen under a train and by the simple expedient of lying motionless in the middle of the track had been able to get up, when the last carriage had hurtled past, and clamber back on to the platform with nothing more to show from the misadventure than a smudge on my forehead and a persistent ringing in my ears.

  When I left the town for the first time all those years ago, to seek my fortune—picture me, the classic venturer, my worldly possessions over my shoulder in a handkerchief tied to a stick—I took certain choice things away with me, stored in my head, so that I might revisit them in after years on the wings of memory—the wings of imagination, more like—which I often did, especially when Gloria and I went to live in the far, bleached south, to keep myself from feeling homesick. One of those treasured items was a mental snapshot of a spot that had always been for me a totem, a talisman. It was nowhere remarkable, just a bend in a concrete road on the side of a hill leading up to a little square. It wasn’t what could be called a place, really, only a way between places. No one would have thought to pause there and admire the view, since there wasn’t one, unless you count a glimpse of the Ox River, more a trickle than a river, down at the foot of the hill, meandering along a railed-off culvert. There was a high stone wall, an old well, a leaning tree. The road widened as it rose, and had a tilt to it. In my recollection it’s always not quite twilight there, and a greyish luminance suffuses the air. In this picture I see no people, no moving figures, just the spot itself, silent, guarded, secretive. There is a sense of its being removed, somehow, of its being turned away, with its real aspect facing elsewhere, as if it were the back of a stage set. The water in the well plashes among mossed-over stones, and a bird hidden in the branches of the languishing tree essays a note or two and falls silent. A breeze rises, murmuring under its breath, vague and restless. Something seems about to happen, yet never does. You see? This is the stuff of memory, its very lining. Was that what I was looking for in Polly: the hill road, the well, the breeze, the bird’s faltering song? Can that be what it was all about? I’ll be damned. Polly as the handmaid of Mnemosyne—the notion never occurred to me, until now.

  Let me try to tease this out.

  Or no, please, no, let me not.

  Anyway, it was to that spot I retreated after leaving Marcus, and tarried there a while, listening to the wind in the leaves and the well-water tinkling. I wished that some god would come and transform me into laurel, into liquid, into air itself. I was shaken; I was fearful. The end of my world was nigh.

  I went to the studio, my last refuge indoors. Not much of a refuge, though, for I found Polly waiting for me at the top of the steep stairway. She had no key—prudently, I had not let her have one, despite her repeated hints and, as time went on, increasingly resentful demands—but the launderer’s wife had let her in downstairs. She was sitting sideways on the top step, leaning with her shoulder against the door and hugging her knees to her chest. When I had climbed the stairs—scaffold, I nearly wrote—she leaped up and embraced me. She is in general a warm-blooded girl but today she was fairly on fire, and trembling all over and gasping rather than breathing; it might have been a bolting colt that had flung itself into my arms. She had a hot smell, too, fleshy and humid, almost the same smell, it seemed, of teary distress, that I had caught from Marcus earlier. “Oh, Oliver,” she said in a muffled wail, her mouth squashed against the side of my neck, “where were you?” I told her, in an undertaker’s tolling tone, my guts clenching, that I had been to lunch with—wait for it—with Marcus! At once she reared back, holding me at arm’s length, and stared at me horror-struck. I noticed the mark over her cheekbone from Marcus’s wedding ring; it wasn’t much of a cut but the skin around it was livid. “He knows!” she cried. “He knows about us—did he tell you?”

  I swerved my eyes away from hers and nodded. “He told me about you,” I said. “Me, he doesn’t seem to know about.” Ghastly though the moment was, I’m ashamed to say that I could feel a stirring in my blood—how coy we are—what with the sultry smell she was giving off and the pressure of her hips against mine. The first time I got a girl into my arms and rubbed myself against her—never mind who she was, let’s spare ourselves all that—what startled me and excited me deeply, however paradoxical it may sound, was the absence at the apex of her legs of anything except a more or less smooth, bony bump. I can’t think what I had expected to be there. I wasn’t that innocent, after all. Somehow, though, it was the very lack that seemed a promise of hitherto unimagined and delightful explorations, insubstantial transports. How fantastic they were, my dreams and desires. It’s bound to be the same for everyone. Or maybe it’s not. For all I know, the things that go on inside other people may bear no resemblance whatever to what goes on in me. That is a vertiginous prospect, and I perched up there all alone in front of it.

  “Of course he doesn’t know i
t’s you!” Polly said. “Do you think I’d tell him?” She gave me an aggrieved sniffle, seeming to expect thanks. I said nothing, only got the key out of my pocket and reached around her and opened the door and stumped ahead of her into the room. I was like a man made of stone, or no, of chalk, stolid and stiff yet quick to crumble.

  After the dimness of the stairs the studio blazed with a white, almost phosphorescent, radiance, and the window was so bright I could hardly look at it. There was still a faint whiff of brandy in the air, mingled with the ever-present soggy aroma of soap suds from downstairs. It was cold in the room—I had never figured out how to heat the place properly—and Polly stood with her shoulders indrawn and her arms tightly folded across her chest, hugging herself. She had no make-up on, not even lipstick, and her features seemed smeared, and almost anonymous. She was wearing a bran-coloured duffel-coat and those flat shoes, like dancing pumps, that I suspect she wears, or used to wear, in deference to my short stature—I say again, if I haven’t said it already, she really is unfailingly considerate and kind, and certainly didn’t deserve the grief and heartache that I caused her, that I’m causing her yet. I remarked on the shoes, saying she shouldn’t have come out so lightly shod on such a day. She gave me a blackly reproving frown, as if to ask how I could talk about such things as weather and footwear at a time like this. Quite right, of course: I’m never any good in moments of high drama, and become either tongue-tied or uncontrollably garrulous. It’s always difficult when a person one has known intimately takes a sudden step, up or down, on to a new and altogether different level. I hardly recognised my cherished and ever-lovable Polly in this whey-faced, distressed and anxious creature in her shapeless coat and pitiable shoes. Particularly unsettling was the look in her eyes, a mixture of fear and doubt and defiance, and utter, utter helplessness. Whyever did she let me wheedle my way into her heart? What opportunity for escape and fulfilment had seemed to open before her when I started verbally pawing her that long-ago night at the Clockers, the night that had led with oiled inevitability to this moment, with the two of us standing there in the chilly light of day, not knowing what to do, with ourselves or with each other?

  It hadn’t been more than a couple of hours since I had been there with Marcus, my heart equally filled with foreboding, my mind equally at a loss. Next thing Gloria would come storming in and the grotesque bedroom farce would be complete.

  All at once, for no reason I could or can think of, I found myself recalling the last visit my father paid to the print shop, when it was already sold but the launderer had not yet moved in. Why was I there that day? Dad was mortally ill, he would die a few weeks later, so I suppose he had to have someone to accompany him on his valedictory outing. But why me? I was the youngest of the family. Why didn’t one of my brothers or my sister go with him? I was fifteen, and in a rage. I was young and callous and death bored me—death as it is for others, that is, my own and the prospect of it being one of the most fascinating and feared topics for thought and speculation. I had already lost my mother and was indignant that I would so soon again have to accompany my father on the same final, dismal descent. There was a lot of stuff left in the shop. Dad had tried to get rid of it all, but by now the town knew he was dying, and was therefore infected with bad luck, and on the day of the Positively Final Monster Sale few customers turned out. Now, stooped and cadaverous, he sorted among boxes of prints, looking for who knows what, thumbed through dog-eared account books, peered into the empty cash register, vexedly sighing when he wasn’t coughing. It was a summer Saturday afternoon, and billows of gilded dust-motes undulated in the air, and there was a smell of dry rot and parched paper. I stood in the open doorway with my hands in my pockets, glowering out into the sunlit street. “What’s the matter with you?” my father called to me testily. “I’ll be finished here in a minute, then you can go.” I said nothing, and kept my back turned. People passing by put their heads down and would not look in. The thought occurred to me that in a way my father was dead already, and everyone, including myself, was impatient for him to realise it and take himself off, out of our troubled sight. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash behind me, so loud that I instinctively ducked. My father had pushed over a heavy wooden display stand, it lay now face down at his feet in a cloud of dust. The side of it had splintered, and I remember marvelling at the stark, shocking whiteness of the wound where the inner wood was nakedly on show. My father stood at a crouch, knees bent and elbows crooked, looking at what he had done and shaking all over, his face twisted and his side teeth bared in a furious snarl that made me wonder for a moment if he had gone completely and violently mad at last, cracking under the strain of facing the death awaiting him. I gaped at him, frightened, but fascinated, too. Awful, isn’t it, how the most appalling calamity will seem a welcome punctuation of life’s general tedium? Boredom, the fear of it, is the Devil’s subtlest and most piercing goad. After a moment my father went limp, as if all his bones had melted on the spot, and he closed his eyes and put a trembling hand to his forehead. “Sorry,” he muttered, “it fell. I must have bumped it.” We both knew this was a lie, and were embarrassed. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie, as he always did in the shop, a biscuit-coloured cardigan with those buttons made of braided leather, and the pair of cracked black shoes that were, when I found them under his bed the day after he died, the thing that at last pressed a secret lever and let me break down and weep, sitting on the floor, in the puddle of my grieving self, holding them, one in each hand, while big hot extravagant tears rolled down my cheeks and dropped ticklingly off the tip of my chin. Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong? I think of my father’s worn shoes, of that cardigan with the drooping pockets, of his stringy neck wobbling inside a shirt-collar that lately had become three or four sizes too big for him, and it is as if I had woken up to find that while asleep I had put to death some small, defenceless creature, the last one, the very last, of its marvellous species. No forgiveness? None. He would let me off, would Dad, if he were here, but he isn’t, and I’m not permitted to absolve myself. No crime, no charge, aye, and no acquittal, either.

  I led Polly to the sofa, as so often before but with a very different intent this time, and we sat down side by side, like a pair of guilty miscreants settling themselves resignedly in the dock. She hadn’t taken off her coat, and this made her look more miserable still, all toggled up in bulky shapelessness. “What am I going to do?” she said, a faint, strangled cry. I told her that was what Marcus had asked me when he was here, and that I hadn’t known what to say to him, either. “He was here?” she said, staring at me. I told her about him coming up the stairs and bursting in and demanding drink; I told her about us emptying the brandy bottle. “I thought you were drunk, all right,” she said. After that she was silent for a while, thinking. Then she began to speak about her life with Marcus, just as Marcus, a while ago, had spoken of his life with her. Her account of it—their early days together, the baby, their happiness, all that—was strikingly similar to his. This irritated me. In fact, I was by now in a state of irritation generally. Life, which had seemed so various before, a sprawling pageant of adventure and incident, had all at once narrowed to a point, the nexus of this little trio: Polly, her husband, me. Glumly I foresaw the days and weeks to come, as gradually our drama unfurled itself in all its predictable awfulness. Polly would admit who her secret lover was, and Marcus would come and shout at me and threaten violence—perhaps more than threaten—then Gloria would find out and I’d have her to deal with, too. I felt beaten down just by the thought of it. Polly was still telling her story, more to herself it seemed than to me, in a dreamy, singsong voice. I kept being distracted by the window and the washed-blue sky outside, with its sedately sailing pearl-and-copper clouds. Clouds, clouds, I never get used to them. Why do they have to be so baroque, so gaudily and artlessly lovely? “We used to take baths together,” Polly said. Th
at got my attention. At once I had a searingly vivid image of them, sitting at either end of the tub, their soapy legs entwined, splashing each other, Marcus chuckling and Polly hilariously squealing. It was strange, but I had never, before today, thought of them in the intimacy of their lives together. Marvellous how the mind can keep things tightly sealed away in so many separate compartments. I knew, of course, that they shared a bed—there was only one bed in their house, a double, Polly had told me so herself—but I had declined to picture the ramifications of this simple though striking fact. I could no more have imagined them making love than I could have pictured my parents, when they were alive, clasped to each other in the throes of passion. All that was changed, now. I could feel my shoulder-blades begin to sweat. Is there anything more overwhelming than the sudden onset of jealousy? It rolls over one inexorably, like lava, boiling and smoking.