The Courts of Love Read online

  The Courts of Love

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1996 by Ellen Gilchrist

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition September 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-63576-153-5

  The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material:

  Excerpts from KoolYule by Mark Brymer. Copyright © by Mark Brymer, Bymark Publishing Company, Milwaukee.

  Excerpt from “Galaxy Song” by Eric Idle and John De Prez. Copyright © 1983 by KAY-GEE-GEE MUSIC and EMI Virgin Music Ltd. Reprinted by permission of EMI Music Ltd.

  Excerpts from “The Golden Bough” from Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1991 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Excerpts from “The Panther” from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Excerpts from “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” and “Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” by Dylan Thomas from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright 1946, 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from “Lament” by Dylan Thomas from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  The Oxford American, in which “Paradise” was first published.

  “. . . for the lovers, their arms

  Round the griefs of the ages,

  Who pay no praise or wages

  Nor heed my craft or art.”

  –Dylan Thomas

  And for Mike Mattil, friend and counselor, purveyor of commas and common sense, font of knowledge.

  “Just remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, cause there’s bugger all down here on earth.”

  –Monty Python

  “To hell with elitist fashion; to hell with elitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea; and above all, to hell with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real.”

  –John Fowles

  Contents

  I. Nora Jane and Company

  Perhaps a Miracle

  Lunch at the Best Restaurant in the World

  The Incursions of the Goddamn Wretched Past

  On the Problem of Turbulence

  You Must Change Your Life

  The Brown Cape

  The Affair

  Design

  A Wedding by the Sea

  II. Stories

  New Orleans

  A Man Who Looked Like Me

  Paradise

  Fort Smith

  Desecration

  Update

  The Dog Who Delivered Papers to the Stars

  An Ancient Rain Forest, or, Anything for Art

  Excitement, Part I

  Also by Ellen Gilchrist

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  I

  Nora Jane and Company

  In which the fathers of the twin girls Tammili and Lydia Whittington meet again. One would think this was inevitable. Their DNA had swum together for nine months, hands touching, legs embracing. In many ways they are closer than either of them are to the mother. These three people, caught forever in Indra’s net. The net of jewels, in which each jewel contains the reflections of all the others. The twins are ten years old. Freddy Harwood is forty-four. Sandy George Wade is thirty-one. Nora Jane is twenty-nine. The universe is several trillion million and beginning to coalesce. Nineteen ninety-five and we are still in orbit. Keep your fingers crossed.

  Perhaps a Miracle

  It was the worst argument they had had in months. Nora Jane almost never argued with Freddy Harwood. In the first place she thought he was smarter than she was and in the second place he always went rational on her and in the third place there were better ways to get what she wanted. The best way was to say she wanted something and then not mention it for a week or two. All that time he would be arguing with himself about his objection and in the end he would decide he didn’t have the right to impose his ideas on any other human being, not even his wife. Freddy had not gone to Berkeley in the sixties for nothing. The Greening of America and The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef were still among his favorite books. Once a reporter had asked Freddy to name his ten favorite books and he had left out both those books because this was the nineties and Freddy was famous in the world of publishing and independent bookstores and he didn’t want to seem too crazy in public. If someone had asked him the ten things he regretted most, leaving The Greening of America and The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef off his list would have been right up there with the butterfly tattoo on his ankle.

  “It doesn’t matter what you take,” he said out loud. “It’s none of my business.”

  “You don’t care what I take?”

  “All I said is that sociology is a pseudoscience and you’re too good for that kind of mush. I didn’t mean you shouldn’t take it. I should never have asked what you are going to take. I’m embarrassed that I asked. All I care about is that you be home by three so the girls won’t come home to an empty house.”

  “You don’t want me to go to college. I can tell.”

  “I want you to go to college fiercely. I wish I could quit work and go with you. My biology is about twenty years behind the field.”

  “Freddy.” She climbed down off the ladder. She had been putting up drapes while Freddy read. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater and a pair of jeans. She was wearing ballet shoes.

  “You wear that stuff to drive me crazy,” Freddy said. “If they sold that perfume Cleopatra used on Caesar, you’d wear it every day. How can I let you go to college? Every man at Berkeley will fall in love with you. Education will come to a grinding halt. No one will learn a thing. No one will be able to teach. It’s my civic duty to keep you at home. I owe it to the culture.” He pulled her across the room and began to dance with her. He sang an old Cole Porter song in a falsetto voice and danced her around the sofas. One thing about Nora Jane. She could move into a scenario. “Where are the girls?” she asked.

  “In the den doing homework. I told them I’d take them down to Berkeley to get an ice cream cone when they were finished.”

  “Meet me in the pool house. Hurry.” She smiled the wild, hard-won smile that worked on Freddy Harwood better than all the perfumes of the East.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he answered, and let her go and she walked away from him and out of the room and down the stairs and across the patio to the guest house beside the swimming pool. She went into the bedroom and took off her clothes and waited. In a moment he was there. He turned off the lights to the pool with a switch on the wall. He locked the door and lay down beside her and began to make love to her.

  It was Freddy’s theory that the way you made love to a woman was to worship every inch of her body with your heart and mind and soul. This was easy with Nora Jane. He had worshiped every inch of Nora Jane since the night he met her. He loved beauty, had been raised to know and worship
beauty, believed beauty was truth, balance, order. He worshiped Nora Jane and he loved her. Ten years before, on a snow-covered night in the northern California hills, he had delivered the twin baby girls who were his daughters. With no knowledge of how to do it and nothing to guide him but love, he had kept them all alive until help came. Nora Jane had another lover at the time and no one knew whose sperm had created Lydia and Tammili. Most of the time Freddy Harwood didn’t give a damn if they were his or not. They lived in his home and carried his name and gave his life meaning and kept Nora Jane by his side. The other man had disappeared before they were born and had not been heard from since. It was a shadow, but all men have shadows, Freddy knew. Where it was darkest and there was no path. This was Freddy’s credo. Each knight entered the forest where it was darkest and there was no path. If there was a path, it was someone else’s path.

  Freddy ran his hand up and down the side of Nora Jane’s body. He trembled as he touched her small round hip. I cultivate this, he decided. Well, some men gamble.

  II

  A four-year-old boy named Zandia, who was visiting his grandmother in the house next door, had been trying all week to get to the Harwoods’ heated swimming pool. He didn’t necessarily want to get in the water. He wanted to get the blue and white safety ring he could see from his grandmother’s fence. All these days and his grandmother had not noticed his fascination with the pool. Perhaps she had noticed it but she hadn’t given it enough weight. She trusted the lock on the gate, and besides, Zandia was such a wild little boy. He could have four or five plans of action going at the same time. His latest fascination was with vampires, and Clyda Wax, for that was his grandmother’s name, had been occupied with overcoming his belief in them. “Where did you ever see a vampire?” she kept asking. “There is no such thing as a vampire, Zandia. There are vampire bats. I’ll admit that. But they live in caves and they are very stupid and blind and I could kill a hundred of them with a broom.”

  “They would fly up and eat your blood. They can fly.”

  “I’d knock them down with the broom. They are blind. It would be easy as pie. I’d have a bushel basket full of them.”

  “They’d fly up and stick to the trees. What would you do then?”

  “I’d get a giraffe to eat them.”

  “But giraffes live in Africa.”

  “So what? I can afford to import one.”

  “What about Count Dracula? You couldn’t kill him.”

  “There isn’t any Count Dracula. There’s just that vulgar, disgusting, imbecilic Hollywood trash that you are exposed to in L.A. I shudder to think what they let you watch down there. Did the baby-sitter show it to you? Did the baby-sitter tell you about vampires? Vampires are not true. Now go and play with your Jeep for a while. I want to rest.” Clyda closed her eyes and lay back on the lawn chair. She didn’t mean to go to sleep but she was exhausted from taking care of him. She had volunteered for one week. It had turned into three. He had been up that morning at five rummaging around in her kitchen drawers. “When your mother comes to get you I’m going to a spa,” she said sleepily. “I’m going to Maine Chance and stay a month.”

  As soon as he saw she was asleep he walked over to the fence and undid the latch. He pushed the latch open and disappeared through the gate. There it was, shimmering in the moonlight, the swimming pool with all its chairs and the red rubber raft and the safety ring. He walked under the window of the bedroom where Nora Jane and Freddy lay in each other’s arms. He walked around the chairs and up to the edge of the water. He bent over and saw his reflection in the water. Then he began to fall.

  “Something’s wrong.” Nora Jane sat up. She pushed Freddy away from her. She jumped up from the bed. She tore open the door and began to run. She got to the pool just as Zandia was going under. She ran around the edge. She jumped in beside him and found him and they began to struggle. She pulled and dragged him through the water. When she got to the shallow end she pulled him up into the air. Then the lights were on and Freddy was in the water with her and they lifted him from the water and turned him upside down and Freddy was on the mobile phone calling 911.

  “How did you know?” they asked her. After it was over and Zandia was in his grandmother’s arms eating cookies and the living room was full of uniformed men and Tammili and Lydia had seen their naked parents performing a miracle and were the most cowed ten-year-old girls in the Bay Area.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I knew. I just knew to go to the pool.”

  “You’ve never even met this kid?” one of the men in uniform asked.

  “I’ve seen him in the yard. He’s been in the yard next door.”

  Later that night, after Zandia and his grandmother had been walked to their house and Tammili had been put to bed reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Lydia had been put to bed reading a catalog from American Girl and they were alone in their room, Freddy had opened all the windows and the skylight above the bed and they had lain in each other’s arms, awed and pajamaed, talking of time and space and life at the level of microbiology and wave and particle theory and why Abraham Pais was their favorite person in New York City and how it was time to take the girls to the Sierra Nevada to see the mountains covered with snow. “We need to do something to mark it. Plant some trees at Willits. Lay bricks for a path.”

  “You could rearrange the books in the den. It’s such a mess in there Betty won’t even go in to clean. It’s unhealthy to have that many books in a room. It’s musty. It’s like a throwback to some other age. It doesn’t go with the rest of the house.”

  “Go on to sleep if you can.”

  “I can. You’re the one who doesn’t sleep.”

  “We should both sleep tonight. Something’s on our side. I never felt that as strongly as I do right now.” He patted her for a while. Then he began to dream his old dream of building the house at Willits. The solar house he and Nieman had built by hand to prove it could be done and to prove who they were. Our rite of passage into manhood house, Freddy knew. The house to free us from our mothers. In the recurrent dream it was a clear, cold day. They had finished the foundation and were beginning to set the posts at the sides. The mountain lions came and sat upon the rise and watched them. “You think I’m nuts to go to all this trouble to make a nest,” he told the lions. “Well, you’re wrong. This is what my species does.”

  In that magical house Tammili and Lydia were born and sometimes Freddy thought the house had been built to serve that purpose. To make them so much his that nothing could sever the bond. So what if one or both of them were Sandy George Wade’s biological spawn? So what if maybe Tammili was his and Lydia was not? So what in a finite world if there was love? Freddy always ended up deciding.

  Next door, it was Zandia’s grandmother who couldn’t sleep. She was talking to Zandia’s mother on the phone. “You just come up here tomorrow afternoon as soon as they finish shooting and spend the night. He’s lonely for you. Four-year-old boys shouldn’t be away from their mother for this many days.”

  “I can’t. We have to look at rushes every night. It’s the first time Sandy and I have had a chance to be in a film together. I’m a professional, Mother. I have to finish my work, then I’ll come get him. There’s no reason you can’t hire a baby-sitter for him, you know. He stays with baby-sitters here.”

  “He almost died, Claudine. I don’t think you understand what happened here. You never listen to me, do you know that? You only half listen to anything I say. The child almost died. Also, he is obsessed with vampires. Who let him see a movie about vampires? That’s what I’d like to know. I’m taking him to my psychiatrist tomorrow for an evaluation.”

  “All right then. I’ll send someone to get him. I thought you wanted him, Mother. You always do this. You say you want him, then you change your mind in about four days.”

  “He almost drowned.”

  “Could we talk in the morning? I’ll call you at seven.”

  Claudine hung up the phone, then we
nt into the bedroom to find Sandy. He was in bed smoking and reading the script. He put the cigarette out when he saw her and shook his head. “Where have you been?” he asked. “What took you so long?”

  “Zandia fell in a swimming pool and Mother’s neighbor had to fish him out. They’re acting like it was some sort of big, big deal. God, she drives me crazy. This is the last time he’s going up there. From now on if she wants to see him she can come down here.”

  “We’ll be finished in a week or ten days. It can’t drag on much longer than that. You think we ought to send for him?”

  “She can bring him. I’ll tell her in the morning. I’ll line up a sitter and he can go back to the Montessori school in the mornings. I knew better than to do this.”

  “How’d he fall in a pool?”

  “Mother’s neighbors left the gate open or something. The police came. He’s fine. Nothing happened to him. It’s just Mother’s insanity.”

  Then Sandy George Wade, who was the father of Lydia Harwood, as anyone who looked at them would immediately know, began to flip channels on the television set, hoping to find a commercial starring either Claudine or himself, as that always cheered him up and made him think he wouldn’t end up in a poor folks home. He reached for Claudine, to believe she was there, and sighed deep inside his scarred, motherless, fatherless heart. His main desire was to get a good night’s sleep so he would be beautiful for the cameras in the morning.

  Claudine pulled away from him. She got up and went into the other room to call her mother back. When she returned she had a different plan. “We have to go to San Francisco and pick him up. She won’t bring him. Well, to hell with it. She wants me to meet the woman who pulled him out of the pool. I probably ought to sue them for having an attractive nuisance. Anyway, we have to go. Will you take me?”