They sat down in a sunny place to dry, and she put on her dark glasses.
«I never cry,» Joel lied.
She turned on her stomach, and, fingering moss, said with gentle matter-of-factness: «Well, I do. I cry sometimes.» She looked at him earnestly. «But you don’t ever tell anybody, hear.»
He wanted to say: no, Idabel, dear Idabel, I am your good true friend. And he wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek. There was a hush; tenuous moods of light and shade seemed to pass between them like the leaf-shadow trembling on their bodies. Then Idabel tightened all over. She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull, and when she did this a terrible, and puzzled rage went through Joel.
This was the real betrayal. And so he fought back; tangled and wrestling, the sky turning, descending, revolving, they rolled over, over. The dark glasses fell off, and Joel, falling back, felt them crush beneath and cut his buttocks. «Stop,» he panted, «please stop, I’m bleeding.» Idabel was astride him, and her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her red, angry face close to his: «Give up?»
«I’m bleeding,» was all Joel would say.
Presently, after releasing him, she brought water, and washed his cut. «You’ll be all right,» she said, as if nothing had happened. And, indefinably, it was as if nothing had: neither, of course, would ever be able to explain why they had fought.
Joel said: «I’m sorry about your glasses.»
The broken pieces sprinkled the ground like green raindrops. Stooping, she started picking them up; then, seeming to think better of this, she spilled them back. «It’s not your fault,» she said sadly. «Maybe. . . maybe some day I’ll win another pair.»
8
Randolph dipped his brush into a little water-filled vinegar jar, and tendrils of purple spread like some fast-growing vine. «Don’t smile, my dear,» he said. «I’m not a photographer. On the other hand, I could scarcely be called an artist; not, that is, if you defineartist as one who sees, takes and purely transmits: always for me there is the problem of distortion, and I never paint so much what I see as what I think: for example, some years ago, this was in Berlin, I drew a boy not much older than yourself, and yet in my picture he looked more aged than Jesus Fever, and whereas in reality his eyes were childhood blue, the eyes I saw were bleary and lost.
And what I saw was indeed the truth, for little Kurt, that was his name, turned out to be a perfect horror, and tried twice to murder me. . . exhibiting both times, I must say, admirable ingenuity. Poor child, I wonder whatever became of him. . . or, for that matter, me. Now that is a most interesting question: whatever became of me?» As if to punctuate his sentences he kept, all the while he talked, thrusting the brush inside the jar, and the water, continually darkening, had at its center, like a hidden flower, a rope of red. «Very well, sit back, we’ll relax a minute now.»
Sighing, Joel glanced about him. It was the first time he’d been in Randolph’s room; after two hours, he still could not quite take it in, for it was so unlike anything he’d ever known before: faded gold and tarnished silk reflecting in ornate mirrors, it all made him feel as though he’d eaten too much candy. Large as the room was, the barren space in it amounted to no more than one foot; carved tables, velvet chairs, candelabras, a German music box, books and paintings seemed to spill each into the other, as if the objects in a flood had floated through the windows and sunk here. Behind his liver-shaped desk unframed foreign postcards crusted the walls; six of these, a series from Japan, were for Joel an education, even though to some extent he knew already the significance of what they depicted.
Like a museum exhibit, there was spread out on a long, black, tremendously heavy table a display consisting in part of antique dolls, some with missing arms, legs, some without heads, other whose bead-eyes stared glass-blank though their innards, straw and sawdust, showed through open wounds; all, however, were costumed, and exquisitely, in a variety of velvet, lace, linen. Now set in the center of this table was a little photograph in a silver frame so elaborate as to be absurd; it was a cheap photograph, obviously taken at a carnival or amusement park, for the persons concerned, three men and a girl, were posed against a humorous backdrop of cross-eyed baboons and leering kangaroos; though he was thinner in this scene and more handsome, Joel, without much effort, recognized Randolph, and another of the men looked familiar, too. . . was it his father? Certainly the face was only mildly reminiscent of the man across the hall.
The third man, taller than his companions, cut an amazing figure; he was powerfully made and, even in so faded a print, very dark, almost Negroid; his eyes, narrow and sly and black, glittered beneath brows thick as mustaches, and his lips, fuller than any woman’s were caught in a cocky smile which intensified the dashing, rather vaudeville effect of a straw hat he wore, a cane he carried. He had his arm around the girl, and she, an anemic faunlike creature, was gazing up at him with the completest adoration.
«Oh, yes,» said Randolph, stretching his legs, lighting a mentholated cigarette, «do not take it seriously, what you see here: it’s only a joke played on myself by myself. . . it amuses and horrifies. . . a rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, nor night; the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven’t already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother’s womb, in the warm blood of darkness.
Wouldn’t that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought the sweetly clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more.» Smiling, smoothing the back of his hair, he put out the cigarette, and picked up his brush. «Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?» He looked at Joel in an amused way. «Answer me: did she?»
«Did she what?» said Joel, for, as usual, he did not understand: Randolph seemed always to be carrying on in an unfathomable vocabulary secret dialogues with someone unseen. «Randolph,» he said, «please don’t be mad with me: it’s only that you say things in such a funny way.»
«Never mind,» said Randolph, «all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you.» Rising, going to a huge baroque bureau, he dabbed on lemon cologne, combed his polished curls, and, posturing somewhat, studied himself in a mirror; while duplicating him in all essentials, the mirror, full-length and of French vintage, seemed to absorb his color, to pare and change his features: the man in the mirror was not Randolph, but whatever personality imagination desired him to resemble, and he, as if corroborating such a theory, said: «They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist. . . he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love. . . poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.»
A shy rap at the door interrupted. «Randolph,» said Amy, «is that boy in there with you?»
«We’re busy. Go away, go away. . .»
«But Randolph,» she whined, «don’t you think he ought to come and read to his father?»
«I said: go away.»
Joel let his face reveal neither relief nor gratitude: to obscure emotion was becoming for him a natural reflex; it helped him sometimes not to feel at all. Still there was one thing he could not do, for there is no known way of making the mind clear-blank, and whatever he obliterated in daytime rose up at night in dreams to sleep beside him with an iron embrace. As for reading to his father, he’d made an odd discovery: Mr Sansom never really listened: a list of prices recited from a Sears Roebuck interested him, Joel had found by experiment, as much as any wild-west story.
«Before it happened,» said Randolph, resuming his seat, «before then, Ed was very different. . . very sporting, and, if your standards are not too distinguished, handsome (there, in that photograph you can see for yourself), but, to be truthful, I never much liked him, quite the contrary; for
