eorge!” Marilyn threw her arms up into the air as she ran across the front lawn to him. “I’m so happy to see you.” Marilyn embraced him with glee.
“My goodness!” he said. “You’d think we hadn’t seen each other in a million years.”
“It seems like it.”
“It’s only been a month and a half. I take it farm life doesn’t suit you.”
“Oh, there’s no farming here,” she evaded.
“Well, I’m glad of that, because I don’t know which end of an animal to feed, even. I know I said that I’d be bringing someone, but, well, you know how it is, and I guess I’m alone again, for now, so it’s just me. But you haven’t even seen the new movies that are coming out, so I get to tell you all the plots over bottles of wine, you know, and at least these ones you haven’t heard yet.”
She bustled him into the house, and he unloaded liquor and cards and brightly colored presents on the table.
“George, it’s gorgeous,” she modeled the pink and amber velvet scarf that he’d brought for her. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she asked Paul.
“Beautiful.”
“Maybe you can sculpt me in this.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“Oh, I know you artists,” said George. “You’d rather sculpt her in the nude. I know.”
Prudishly, Paul reddened.
“George, it’s such a relief to have you here,” Marilyn said. “Just to have some noise in the house.”
They stayed up late that night, with chocolates and wine and cheese and cards, laughing and talking.
“Oh, yes, and when she gives him that look, you know the look I mean.”
“I know! There’s something sinister in looking that appealing, you know.”
“Ahh, the sinister seductress.”
“It’s not just being a seductress. It’s power, power, power. All the way. The look of the puppetmaster, that can pull the strings.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, “I just don’t believe it. A woman isn’t a puppetmaster just because she looks at a man. You have the power to receive a look and not do anything at all about it.”
“Now, you know that’s not true,” said George. “Not always.”
“Yes, it is true! You have the power to see a beautiful woman in sexy clothing, with a shirt cut down to here and a skirt cut up to there, and not assault her, don’t you?”
“Well, maybe I do,” said George. “But I’m unusual that way.”
“If I look at you, and I move you, I’m speaking to something inside you. Resonating. It’s what’s inside you that’s moving you. You are your own puppetmaster.”
“I think you’ve had too much wine, my dear.”
Paul was sitting in the corner, quietly, watching her drink and laugh and chatter. The house resounded with noise and music. Something in him responded with a cold hardness. His quiet place, his sanctuary was being invaded.
He got up silently and went upstairs, and the other two didn’t notice him going.
Eventually George got tired and fell asleep on the couch without even bothering with anything but a blanket thrown over him. Marilyn sat up by the window, not tired. She was full of everything, full where she’d been so empty for so long. She looked out the window into the night sky, and she just fell into a trance. Not sleeping, but not, somehow aware. Looking out at the moon and the stars and the sky.
he next morning, George’s eyes snapped open, and he saw Marilyn framed against the window. The sunlight was streaming in, making her hair glow with a holy brilliance.
“Did you stay up all night?” he asked, and she turned around, the spark of the sun still in her eyes.
“I must have fallen asleep here by the window.”
“Must have?”
“I don’t remember much, I guess I had too much wine.”
“Not that much wine, I thought.”
“This is a strange place. You get forgetful after being here for awhile.”
“You’re talking like you’re in a dream. Are you okay? I mean, really okay?”
She paused, and just then, Paul came down the stairs.
“There you are, honey,” he said, kissing her on top of her head. “You never came to bed last night, did you?”
“I guess not,” she said.
“I tell you what. Why don’t you rustle up some breakfast, and then we can all go out to the caves.”
“The caves?” asked George. “How delightful. How very Tom Sawyer, you know, getting lost down in the darkness and having to rescue the frightened little girl.”
Marilyn laughed out loud and then headed into the kitchen.
“I never thought I’d see Marilyn quietly running off to make breakfast for the men,” said George.
“Isn’t it wonderful, here?” asked Paul, rhetorically. “Fresh, clean air. Back to nature. Back to the basics. Back to a simpler time. Back to…” he paused, looking for the words.
he three of them went down to the caves, where Paul had been rummaging, finding bits of rocks and mineral deposits that he worked into his sculptures. The caves were full of things, shiny things and interesting things, natural formations of something or other that had a certain glow about them.
Paul would dig out a stone, and to Marilyn, it looked just like a rock, a hunk of dead stuff.
Then, he would sculpt a form around it, and embed it in the middle of the piece, and it would become a searing, seeing eye, alive and vivid, staring completely into your soul.
“Paul has a vision for this stuff,” she said. “I think he’s taking the caves apart piece by piece, so he can put it all together into a brilliant statue.”
“I’ve seen some of your stuff,” said George. “It’s got a quality about it that I didn’t know was in you, Paul.”
“Hmmm.” said Paul, but his eyes were on the walls.
“It’s got a darkness, mixed with this vision of perfection. Like Norman Rockwell, but manic depressive.”
“Quite a compliment,” said Marilyn.
“Oh, I mean it as a compliment,” George went on. “It’s full of a kind of controlled energy and passion for the mundane. I don’t know what I mean exactly, you know, but there’s a suppressed sensuality, a dead life to it all.”
“Ah, thanks,” said Paul. “Look at this.” He held in his hand a little pink stone from the wall.
“See what I mean?” said Marilyn. “It doesn’t look like anything at all to me.”
“It’s a heart,” said Paul.
And later, he sculpted a man and woman in an embrace, chest to chest, intertwined, and between them, joining them, a single pink beating heart that seemed to pulse with an ethereal light.
The caves themselves were deep and long. They passed between and among themselves. Marilyn and Paul had explored them for hours upon end, moving through the maze carefully. It always seemed, somehow, to lead back to the beginning, until they got comfortable with wandering and wandering until they somehow wound up back at the entrance.
Of course, there were cracks and crevices in the caves that were too small for them to pass through. In the walls, in the floors, were deep, dark passages between the rocks.
Some of them were shallow, just enough, perhaps, to press your hand into. But not all of them.
Some of them passed down to caverns that opened into streams running underground, to dark chambers where the animals had no eyes. Where white, silken bodies crawled through the dark and the dampness, bodies that knew no light at all.
In the waters, there was a soft glow of bioluminescence that attracted the life surrounding it.
In the darker corners, there was no life, but a soft emptiness that was not death, either.
Here in one cavern, in one corner, low to the floor, crouched Eileen, covered in dust, no awareness in her wide open eyes, eyes that captured only inky blackness.
Further down, through creeping passageways beaten into stone by the droning, meandering trickle of water, melted down from the peaks of mountains unimaginable in the depths, there was a stone indentation, a cubby in the stone wall. Inside, what appeared to be a statue. Nora. Her heart did not beat and her eyes did not flutter, but still they glinted in the darkness as if they had caught one stray photon of light that somehow passed down through the dark and into the darker.
And below her feet in the ever stillness was a soft, dusty silt that hid a break in the stone of the floor. Down through deep rock, veins of something shimmering in the side it, still somehow catching a glint of light that bounced along the same passageway. Down deeper into the ground, here was a still, shallow pool, black as ink, lying in the slate and shale.
Prone in the pool, hair flailed out from her head like a halo, peppered with pyrite, lay Katy, staring up into the dark, dark, darkness, a stagnant Ophelia in her watery tomb, ever in one moment.
Deeper, deeper, the water dripped down, forming stalactites that pointed the way ever deeper into the ground.
Katy’s mother was here, nearly buried in the wall, a carving, reaching out to nothingness, but deeper, still the caves went down. Through cracks, where silt fell steadily by drops, like an hourglass measuring out the eternity of the world.
It was far below, far beneath, where the vampire lay.
“These caves give me a chill,” said George. “So much rock. I mean, what is rock anyway?” His voice rang and echoed in the quietness of the maze. “It’s not alive, it’s not a plant or an animal. It’s not dead. It’s just a rock. Who knows what it means? If it means anything at all.”
“There’s some sort of meaning in it,” said Marilyn. “Paul sees it.”
“It’s too noisy in here,” said Paul, irritably. “Let’s go.”
aul was in his studio, working on the sculpture,
clutching the little pink heart he treasured in his hand, and George and Marilyn
sat down with cups of tea at the little kitchen table. Marilyn sighed into the
steam rising up off her cup.
“Marilyn, honey, what are you doing here?” asked George. “I mean, fresh air and all that. But what the hell?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at the spinning motion of the heat in her teacup. “Paul can work here. His stuff is actually selling. I don’t even have to work or worry about anything.”
“And so you putter around in the kitchen making eggs, and baking bread, and he digs around in the caves after rocks. I see what he’s getting out of it. But I don’t see what you’re getting out of it.”
“You know how long he worked at that awful job he hated so I could stay home and write.”
“I know he beat your soul up every night when he came home, filling you up with guilt about how he was working day in and day out just so you could write.”
“I owe him this, and at least he’s succeeding. I guess my writing was never going anywhere, anyway.”
“Bite your tongue. What are you doing here?”
She blew into the cup. “I don’t know.”
“Well, you know how I feel about it. This relationship started going nowhere fast. But the worst ones are always the ones that seem to last, aren’t they? You get dragged into them, like quicksand, and then they just won’t let go. Just promise me, you won’t drown in it.”
“Do I look like I’m drowning?”
“You know, in some ways, you do.”
“I just need some time to get my head together. Figure out what I really should be doing. I’m not sure that there’s anything anywhere for me.”
“There’s always something, somewhere.”
aul was locked away in his studio, late into the
night, working away on his stone heart. George fell asleep on the couch again,
with Marilyn sitting by the window. In the night, he woke to the sound of
whispering voices, and he thought that Paul must have come down. His eyes
fluttered open to see Marilyn stepping out through the window. She seemed to
disappear, stepping into the inky blackness like a cloud, and he thought he was
dreaming. In the morning, she was there, staring out into the breaking
morning.
“Slept down here again?” he asked. “It’s like you’re standing watch over me.”
“Am I?” Distracted.
“I dreamed you stepped out the window and disappeared into the darkness.”
“Funny,” she said, looking at him. Her skin was pale and her eyes were dark. “I seemed to dream the same thing. I’ve had vivid dreams here, every night.” She started to get up from the window, but she stumbled, and George popped up off the couch.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, fine,” she said, getting up. “It’s just the mornings, I can’t seem to find my footing always.”
The quietness of the house seemed to even affect George, because that day, he spoke less. Paul came out of his studio, briefly, distracted by the images in his head of his coalescing sculpture. The embrace, eternal, man and woman, something pure and poignant and meaningful, eternally molded out of clay.
“He doesn’t need you to stay with him to do his sculpture,” George whispered to her. “He doesn’t seem to need anyone. Anything.”
“He likes me to be here. I take care of things for him.”
“Slave over him, out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“There’s all kinds of things in town.”
“I’ve seen it. All strip malls and Starbucks. Have you been to see the doctor?”
“I’m okay. Just low blood pressure, you know, a little dizzy when I stand up.”
“Hmmm.”
hat night, George lay down on the couch, but he didn’t go to sleep. The moonlight was streaming in through the window, and Marilyn was silhouetted there. She stared out into the darkness, but she didn’t lay her head down.
George wasn’t tired at all. He could feel something in the air around him, pricking the darkness, pressing against his skin.
He waited, watched in the quietness of the night.
She started to whisper. A murmur, like the bubbling of a creek, coming to him.
The window slowly opened outward into the night. Her hands did not move, they were pressed in tiny fists on the seat, her arms straight and white in the moonlight, holding her bolt upright by the window.
“Marilyn?” he asked, but she didn’t answer. That is, she didn’t answer him.
“Nothing,” she whispered.
The moonlight dimmed in the open window, and a dark figure passed inside. A chill coursed through George’s body, and he burst out in a loud laugh. The figure turned, and the darkness resolved as the dark eyes met George’s. Marilyn stared up at the figure, lost in a trance, murmuring still quietly to herself. But George saw, and it saw George.
“I’m not afraid of you,” George said. “I’ve seen too much to be really afraid of.”
The creature raised one eyebrow and turned away, taking Marilyn by the arm.
“Marilyn,” George said, sitting upright, but she wasn’t there. Just the open window, and the moonlight streaming in. He wondered if he had fallen asleep, but he knew he hadn’t.
“This place isn’t right, I’m telling you, and you know it. You know all about it, with your vivid dreams.” He turned to Paul. “And you, too, probably, with your vision in the clay. I’ve seen too many horror movies, and no, thank you. But I’m telling you, this isn’t a healthy place. It’s not good for you. Because you’re supposed to be out in life, living. And you’re not. So, come with me, and leave him to his artistic visions.”
“George, you’ve got no right to be telling her to leave me.”
“Oh yes I do,” said George, “because I’m her friend and I knew her before you did, and I know what’s going on around here.”
“Get out,” said Paul. “Get out and go, but leave us alone, because our relationship is none of your business.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” said George. “Come on, Marilyn, somewhere in there, you know. The anemia and the dreams, it’s all telling you to get out.”
Marilyn shifted from one foot to the other. “I need to think.”
“Don’t think! Just come with me. There’s still a whole damn world out there.”
“I’m warning you.”
“Oh, stop with your stupid warnings and manly control-freak tone.”
That’s when Paul hauled out and punched George in the face.
’m so sorry,” she kept saying to him, as she bundled George up into his car.
“I’m telling you, you should be coming with me.”
“Shhh,” she said. “You don’t want him to hit you again, do you?”
“What, is he going to hit you, too, now? You know you’ve got to get out.”
“Please,” she said.
“I saw it, last night, though the window. It’s not a dream. You and I can’t have the same dream, now, can we?”
“Look, George, let me think this thing though. I’ll call you. I promise. Everything will be fine.”
In the end, George drove off with his sore jaw puffing up and turning red and smutty blue. And when he left, the veil of quiet fell over the farmhouse, heavier than before.
Paul and Marilyn stood on the porch, watching him drive away.
“I think,” said Marilyn, “that maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s time to go.”
“Look,” said Paul, “I shouldn’t have hauled out and hit him, but what was he babbling about anyway? You’re just upset. Our whole routine was upset by him being here. We just need to get back to our regular routine.”
She was shaking her head.
“This isn’t the way I want to live, forever,” she said.
“Come on, we’re happy here. I’m working, we’ve got enough money, no worries.”
“No worries, no joys, no nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
“Not for you, maybe.”
“Can’t you even stick it out for a few months?” His eyes flashed. “You’re so selfish. I worked my fingers to the bone for years, at a crummy job for you, and what did you even do all that time? And here I am, working, making our living for you, and what can you do but complain?”
“George is right, you don’t need me here.”
“I do need you, honey.”
“Maybe a picture of me. Or a robot in the kitchen making your breakfast.”
His hand was itching, now that it had come out and pressed into George’s flesh, it was at the ready, throbbing. It had been itching for a while, perhaps, waiting to come out and shut that mouth of hers when it got going. And it flashed out again.
“Shut up,” he said. “This discussion is over.” A drip-drop of blood crept down from her lip, leaving the taste of iron and salt in her mouth.
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