The Heroes of Ecbatana
Judith Johnson
As the moon cleared the horizon, Gualtiero pulled himself up the rock face. He could barely glimpse the tower. A fissure opened in the fog under his feet and dropped him with a jolt.…he could hear the teakettle whistling and her voice calling from near the window. He peeled the foil off the bouillon cube and dropped the cube into the cup.
“Walt, is something wrong? Why are you taking so long?”
“I’m pouring the hot water now, Daisy.” Again he found himself back in that long ago or alternate world, looking at the cliffs he had climbed only a moment ago. Desiderata, leaning on the battlement beside him, said, “Before it’s too late, Gualtiero, please. I need you to do this now.”
“Forgive me, Desiderata. Aren’t we both too old? What we could do sixty years ago: have we the strength now?” The moon had gone down, but the copper sun was already rising over the cliffs, which dissolved…
…and he filled the cup, stirred to dissolve the bouillon cube. He put the little bud vase on the tray and opened the screen door. He picked a chive flower, then broke off a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace from the weeds near the step. With the bud vase filled, he carried the tray into the living-room. Her walker stood near her chair. The steely lamplight gleamed over her hair. He dropped to one knee, steadying the tray on her lap. Her hand shook. Her stiff, twisted fingers could hardly take the spoon. “Let me help you, Daisy” he said, as the cliffs of that other world rolled back under his feet….
…and she pulled his hand up to her cheek, his palm against her cheekbone, his thumb stroking its curve, his forefinger resting in the deep hollow behind her ear. “Gualtiero, I worship and adore you,” she said, as she had every morning and night of the sixty years since they’d eloped together. “I know we’re too old. There’s something I failed to do. That’s why this is happening to us.” She put his hand to her lips and brushed the fingertips. “Well, we have to see it through. There’s no choice.”
The moon, a flying vessel with flickering blades, slipped under the horizon, creasing the air as if the edge of a door or a window floated behind or partly blocked it. “But if I don’t make it---”
“I didn’t hear that. No, I’m not a silly young woman: I know you may not get through. We’re both very old and very tired. We may not have much more time….”
…and on the other side of the air, he knelt and steadied the tray.
“Walt, how sweet of you to bring me flowers. It’s grown so dim: what are they?”
“Well, this one’s Queen Anne’s lace, and that’s a blue chive from the clump by the kitchen door. I haven’t weeded, and it’s lucky I didn’t. Weeds are all that’s growing there right now.”
“So it’s blue and white, your bouquet. Well, it’s pretty, weeds or not. You don’t have to hold the spoon. I can manage.” She lifted the spoon to her mouth, hand still shaking, spilling bouillon over her robe. “Walt, I’m sorry. This isn’t helping at all. It’s making me even more nauseous. Please: some tea instead?”
“Of course, my love.”
“I hate being so much trouble. I’ll be better tomorrow.”
“It’s no trouble.” He carried the tray back, relit the burner under the kettle.
“Walt, I’m so sorry to need you again. Please, help me to the bathroom?”
He turned down the burner, trudged back, bent, and hauled her up. Holding her hands closed around the walker, which wobbled wildly under her shaky grip, he labored along behind her, his arms under her armpits. She was only a small, crumpled shadow, but she weighed on his arms like a marble Victory. Settling her in the bathroom, he closed the door part way.
If he could sit down and never get up again --- If she would consent to a nurse or at least a housekeeper --- If she would let them move in with one of the children --- Even if she wouldn’t listen to him, if she would listen to Rivka or Emanuel --- But she’d said to all of them, “I didn’t hear that,” brushing necessity away like a fly. If she didn’t have to take the water pill for her blood pressure --- As soon as she was back in her chair she would need the bathroom again. Incontinence was one of the curses of old age, but half the time it was not caused by age or illness itself, but as a side effect of prescribed medications. Sometimes he could hardly get himself there in time either, but it was harder for her, waiting for him to carry her in. If she would use a wheelchair, she’d get there quicker, but she had too much fight to accept that reality.
On memory’s shifting screen as he waited, he could see her determined look, the one she’d worn the night she’d first offered herself to him, in his Greenwich Village studio. What courage she had then, in that world of their youth with its codes of feminine modesty and virtue. She had loved him against her family’s opposition, and, even more, had given herself with no thought of marriage, shy, determined, and gallant all at the same time. And then the sweetness, undressing her, and then the silk slide of her skin, and the sudden heat. And that silvery hour before dawn, when the alarm rang. Hurriedly they dressed, and he took her home on the subway and sneaked her in. It had taken months to persuade her to elope. She had insisted that marriage would trap them both.
“Walt, dear, can you help me up?” He pulled her up, tidied her, and lugged her out. As always, she looked away. She hated his seeing her like this in the bathroom with no dignity. Back near the window he eased her into her chair, then gave her bottom a light pinch. “Oh Walt,” she said, touching his cheek with her twisted hand. “What a naughty man you are, my love.”
“Daisy, dear, usually you say, not in front of the children. But I can, now; I can do anything I want, because Emanuel’s in Hartford, and Rivka won’t be here till the weekend. Tonight I’ll seduce you again, the way I did when we were young.”
“Walt, I worship and adore you.”
He rested both hands on her face, his thumbs on her cheeks, the forefingers brushing behind her ears where childhood mastoid surgery had scooped deep hollows. “Let me get your tea, my sweetheart.” In the kitchen, he turned the burner back up. A moment’s dizziness assailed him. He closed his eyes.
“Walt, are you there? Is the tea ready?”
“It’s heating now.”
“I can’t hear you. I’m cold suddenly, so cold. Please, can you bring the blanket?”
“I’ll be right there.” The kettle began to growl, not yet at full boil, but rising fast like the snarl of distant aircraft. Leaning against the counter top, he waited for his weakness to pass. “Oh dear, dear, dear,” he whispered, as close as he could bring himself to uttering a thumping great profanity….
…He couldn’t keep going. On hands and knees, he hauled himself from one outcrop to the next across the jagged scoria. The air was cracked by that almost invisible fracture, a hinge or the edge of something. A knife-edge shadow sliced across the ground. He raised his head. The tower loomed, iron black, one seamless polished sheet from ground to sky. An oak door stood ajar, opening on a spiral staircase....
…The door hung, creaking in the wind. Dropping his book-bag, he ran into the living-room. His mother sat bent over, hands covering her eyes.
“What’s wrong? Where’s your medicine?”
“It won’t help.”
“Well, Daddy’s route ends Fridays. He’ll be home tonight, and will get a new doctor.”
“He isn’t coming home, Walt. He wrote. He’s found someone, and wants a divorce. What will we do? I can’t take care of myself now, let alone you and your sister.”
He leaned forward behind his mother’s chair, stroking her cheek. He wanted someone infinitely protective to hold him in her arms, but there was nobody like that here. Not since the cancer, anyway. “We don’t need that crummy old sardine salesman. I’m a big boy now. I can take care of you.”
They’d pieced together a patchwork to support them, early mornings, late afternoons, nights, weekends: pharmacy and grocery delivery boy, and, until his voice changed and he lost his beautiful, clear soprano, paid choir boy in the cathedral. After his mother’s death, he’d repaired railway signals to put himself and his sister through college. Then there was the party in the Village, the dark-haired girl in her flapper dress, seated at the window with the light framing her from behind, one arm resting along the back of her chair, one foot thrust slightly forward, her ankle at just the right slant to catch his eye. He’d sat down cross-legged in front of her. When she’d asked if he’d like to bring a chair over, he’d said, “No, I’m an ankle man….”
…He felt his age in every bone. This was an errand for some young hero, not for a man past ninety with a leaking heart valve. The dank stones of the spiral staircase oozed. Outside, the tower, with its seven walls, had been forged of one single freezing sheet of iron, but within, it was rubble with no mortar to hold it. Back home Desiderata would wait for him till the end of the world, simply not hearing the possibility of failure, waving it away as she waved any obstacle….
“…Walt, what time is it?”
“It’s cocktail time, my love.” He restocked the bud vase with a spray of goldenrod. The tray held the cocktail shaker, a pitcher of ice water, two slices of toast spread with mashed sardines, and her pills in their saucer: prednisone, water pill, two codeines. Next to the shaker was her glass filled mostly with water, because no matter how desperately she wanted alcohol, she couldn’t mix it with codeine. He poured a dash of Manhattan into her glass, and a copious amount into his own.
“That blossom’s so pretty. What color is it?”
“It’s yellow.”
“Yes, I can just make it out. What kind of flower?”
“It’s goldenrod, my darling. I haven’t anything better to give you.”
“There isn’t anything better than what you give me. Walt, I worship and adore you.” She sipped at her cocktail, spilling most of it on the toast. “Remember our old house, the Tudor house?”
“Yes, my love. What about it? The kitchen? The garden? Nights when the children slept?”
“Those, certainly. First, you reading aloud to me, and then in bed when the night sang, with the moon floating over us. Those first weekends: remember how you painted the children’s rooms with giraffes and elephants, like a ring of carousel animals on the walls, and how I held the brushes for you? I held my hands over yours when you painted, so that I could feel us work together. I did so love your hands.”
“We didn’t have children yet, not even started. Yet there we were, making everything ready. Weren’t we silly?”
“I think hope is always silly. Think of the children we’ll have, you said. Were we crazy? During the war, working three jobs, commuting into the City, then upstate, then back home to work late nights and into the weekends. I know it was the war effort, and you were too old to serve, so did that instead. But still….Walt, you must have been so tired. I never thought: did I push you too hard?”
“Just hard enough: we pulled through, after all. And we all had to do something. I used to think of you kneeling, weeding ---remember your victory garden? --- while I was driving from one job to the next. I told myself that was your share, and I could do mine.”
“I shouldn’t let it worry me so.” She had dropped some sardine on her robe, and picked at it. “I helped you a little, Walt, didn’t I?”
“Daisy, my love, you did everything. You gave up your job at The Brooklyn Eagle that you’d been so proud of. The sheets and shirts I felt so terrible that we couldn’t afford to send out, and you hand-washed and ironed them. You did hard, physical labor, while I sat at a desk. Why, what would I have done without your devotion?”
She held out her shaking glass. “Give me a little devotion now, then. From your glass. Please, Walt. I’ve spilled all of it.”
He poured her a dash of alcohol from his glass. “Is that good? Shall I give you more?”
“Is there more? Or have I used it all up?”
“You’ll never use it up. You know that.” He poured water, and a small dash of his cocktail.
“Walt, this is awful. I need to go to the bathroom again. Please don’t be---”
“What should I not be, Daisy, dear?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t. I’m so ashamed….”
…Breathing raggedly at the top of the tower Gualtiero stopped outside an arched doorway. Through solid oak panels barred shut he saw into the round room. Across the room a casement window opened upon a winding, golden terraced landscape. It looked nothing like the blasted waste through which he had just toiled, although he must have passed through this too on his way.
He was not physically in the room and the door stayed shut, but through its oak panels he saw a woman seated with her back to him before the open window. All he could see of her was the black silhouette of her hair against the greenish-grey light of the before-dawn sky. Even with her face hidden, she was surely the most beautiful woman in the world. Her voice dropped quietly into the space, calm, deliberate as stone. He caught clearly only one sentence, neither the beginning nor the end: In the lives of the heroes of Ecbatana, there is room for neither memory nor desire, for what have the mountains to do with the sea….
“…Walt, dear, are you there? I feel so sick. Maybe something hot to chase away these chills? Could you make some tea?”
He leaned forward, pushing himself upright with his hands on the bed-frame. In the kitchen in the shivering night, waiting for the water to boil, he wondered who on earth the heroes of Ecbatana might be. Whoever they were, he needed them. He had never run away from an obligation in his life, not like that scoundrel, his father. Just a teenager himself, he had seen his mother through to her death. He had seen his sister through to adulthood. He had been as steadfast and cheerful under fire as any man could be. But he had no strength left. The fate Daisy most feared was to be sent to a nursing home where she would have to wait for attention. Nobody would have the patience to care for her. When she felt nauseated or cold, nobody would jump up immediately to make tea. At the thought of this, the weakness roared over him again with the force of a fleet of aircraft, the hot backwind beating down on his face. He held on, bent over the counter, whispering, “oh, dear, dear, dear,” while his heart pounded.
He knew the enemy, here in the kitchen as he stood doubled over. The iron challenger in clanking armor strode up the driveway. Daisy lay terrified that something was happening to him, while he scrabbled in the odds-and-ends drawer for the nitroglycerin, too weak to turn the heat down. He did not need some legendary hero to save him, with a sword and a gigantic horse: he who had never in his life ridden a horse. He needed an everyday, real-life hero, groping for the nitroglycerin pills when heart arrhythmia ambushed him. Somewhere there had to be something to carry him, here, in his ordinary house with its ordinary garden that he no longer had the ordinary strength to weed. He needed one gleam of reachable splendor to come down from Ecbatana, to touch him on the shoulder not with a sword but with one of the household implements he knew how to use, a soup ladle or a can opener, to say: With this touch I give you honor, I give you nobility, I give you courage, I give you generosity of spirit; from this moment no challenge can defeat you.
He straightened himself, not sure if he was still in the tower, climbing the staircase, or still in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil, and leaned against the countertop, whispering to the moon, and whatever angels and demons might be waiting for him, his war cry, “Oh dear, dear, dear.” Stumbling back with the tray, he said, “Here, my Daisy, my flower, my brave girl. I’m sorry I don’t have a diamond crown or a kingdom to bring you. I’m sorry all I have is a cup of tea, but you know it has the whole world in it.”
“Walt, my dearest, I’m sorry I don’t have a kingdom for you either. And I’m so sorry I woke you. You’re the best man in the world, you know you are. And it isn’t the tea. Sometimes when I’ve been lying awake too long, and can’t hear you breathing, I get so frightened. Please go back to sleep now.”
“And here I hoped you woke me to enjoy my lecherous attentions, at least, after you’ve finished your tea.”
“Well, tomorrow night I will. I just have to feel better….Tonight will you read to me?”
“If I can see the words. Sometimes they blur.”
…He ran against the tower door, but it would not open, though he could see into the room through the melting oak. The woman sat at the window, her back to him but her head had turned slightly. The moon gilded the shadow of her cheek and the line of her jaw….
…The alarm should have gone off. He should dress, and take Daisy home. He lay on his elbow, looking down at her, reached across, and turned it off before it could start. Either that woke her, or she had already been awake but not letting on. “What are you doing, Walt?”
“No, Daisy, what am I not doing? I’m not taking you home. We’re getting married.”
“You know I don’t believe in it. We can love each other without all that. We should stay together willingly, not because we’re stuck with each other. I want to be your equal, your partner. I don’t want to diminish into your wife or get trapped in a house.”
“Sweetheart, think of the children we’ll have. We need to get married for their sake. I promise it won’t be a trap.”
“My family will come after us.”
“We’ll trick them. Look, Daisy, we’ll run off to Jersey and send telegrams. They’ll think we’re there. Then we’ll sneak right back and check into a hotel. They’ll never find us.”
And there they stood with a row of other couples, as the city clerk went down the line, a wound-up automaton stopping in front of each couple to mumble, unromantic as a vacuum cleaner, “I now pronounce you man and wife, I now pronounce you man and wife, I now pronounce you man and wife.” They laid their false trail to Atlantic City, then rushed back. At the speakeasy, the waiter poured out bootleg sparkling burgundy, assuring them it was the finest French wine to be had. Laughing and triumphant, they drank the intolerably sweet stuff down.
In the living-room Desiderata kept watch across the snow, peering across their driveway for the glint of enemy troops: an ambulance or a rescue vehicle.
“Mother,” said Emanuel. “You should let us hire a housekeeper or a nurse.”
“I didn’t hear you,” Daisy answered. He couldn’t know how true that was. She had never let anyone know. Although childhood infections and mastoid surgeries had destroyed much of her hearing, Daisy had concealed her infirmity. She taught herself to read lips, to figure out what people must have said. With combative vigor, she refuted, not their actual arguments, but what she guessed they had said, pieced out by what she did catch. If they resisted she simply said, “I’m not going to hear that,” then reiterated her own position.
She had not surrendered one stone. Now, if she hadn’t had Walt to protect, she would have faced death down, just as during the war she had faced down those other adversaries: the laundry, the garden, the house, the children, even that relentless adversary, love. It had felt like a death: her newspaper job that she’d worked so hard for, gone, no longer a journalist but just a housewife, the marriage she had resisted turned into a prison, just as she’d feared—not her fault, nor Walt’s, but still, it had happened. She’d faced down years of it, sometimes in despair, sometimes in silent fury, terrified that her love for him would turn to rage. Compared to that, what was blindness, heart failure, dizziness, crippling pain? Trivial: she could brush it all away. Reality? A moth: be gone right now. But the silence ---
She couldn’t hear him breathing. He must have died. Shaking, she called, and when he woke, sent him to fetch anything, the first thing she thought of, a magic crystal from the tower, a blanket, a cup of tea. She could have done without any of that. But when he was gone too long, as a few minutes ago, when she couldn’t hear or see him moving, she needed to know he was alive. It was himself she needed him to bring.
The tea hadn’t helped. She’d sent it back, and then felt how heavily he fell back into bed. He must be asleep. Lying on her side, she could just make out his labored breathing. In the center of the ceiling the blades of the night carousel whirled its stampeding herds. While she’d been waiting for the tea or whatever she asked for, she had felt that other sharper fear, that he could not keep on, that if she did not go on needing him to take care of her, he would let go and die.
“Walt, please don’t mind my bothering you. It’s so stuffy here. Can you open the window?”
“Of course, my love. It’s no bother.”
Gualtiero leaned against the stones, waiting for his heart to beat again. Outside, the red disk of dawn was rising like the blade of a circular saw. It was months since he’d last stood here. After all, he had not been equal to the test. He must have collapsed. They’d cut him open, put in a pacemaker. He’d come back not to his own home but to Rivka’s. Walt and Daisy had taken over the whole downstairs. Weekends, Emanuel drove over and built wheelchair ramps and bathroom handrails. They had nurse’s aides now, pushing their wheelchairs, helping them to the bathroom, positioning his oxygen tank, and feeding Daisy. They wouldn’t let him take care of her. He was no use to her or to anyone.
She swallowed her codeine tablets, washing them down with cocktail-flavored water, then reached for his hand. “Please, Walt, don’t frighten me like that ever again. Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t well? I didn’t know. I always meant to die first. I didn’t think it would take so long. You rascal, don’t you dare go first.”
“I don’t dare. I couldn’t bear you grieving. Somehow we have to die together. For the one that’s left, it will be beyond endurance.”
“Walt, how awful. I hadn’t thought of that. Just give me a little more time. Don’t leave me yet, promise.”
“I’m doing my best, Daisy. Shall I pour you a little more?”
“Yes, Walt, dear. Give me some of your devotion. I do so need it.”
He poured a few drops from his glass into hers, spilling most of it. His sight had worsened, and he no longer had the breath to read aloud. After dinner, Rivka read to them as they sat in their wheelchairs, holding hands. Sometimes it all blurred, and he couldn’t remember anything he’d just heard.
Desiderata braced her back against her wheelchair, and stared stubbornly into the darkness. Walt made sure the nurses were looking, then leaned over to give Daisy’s bottom a quick pinch.
“Oh, Walt, my love, not in front of the nurses! Whatever will they think?”
“And how else are they to see that I’m in love with the most beautiful woman in the world?”
The house was freezing. They piled quilts over her, but it did no good. Lying with her back against him, Daisy pressed herself closer to Walt under the covers, holding his hand hard to her cheek. “Walt, my darling, you’re my hero. I worship and adore you. Don’t ever forget that. Please.” A sudden ice storm swept her down. The moon went out.
In panic Gualtiero rammed his shoulder against the tower door. With a harsh groan, it gave, and he fell through the doorway, his oxygen tank falling with him. Inside, the room was just as he’d seen it through the oak--- thick night like a croak, and beyond the window the green light of another planet. People swarmed; a mob poured through the door. “Rivka, what’s happened? What’s all this racket?”
“Daddy, darling, she died. It happened last night while we slept.”
Someone slid a tray table over his wheelchair. He could just make out her wedding picture in its frame. Where was she then? He sent the nurse to fetch his daughter. “Where’s your mother, where are you hiding her? This isn’t like you, Rivka. I expected better of you. You shouldn’t punish me. Whatever I did wrong, just tell me, and I’ll never do it again. Just let Daisy come back. Don’t keep her from me. I’ll be good now. I promise. Please.”
“Daddy, darling, you’ve forgotten. She died.”
“I can’t see her picture. Is that it?”
“Here: bend closer. Can you see it now?”
“No, not well, it doesn’t look like her. My darling: she was so beautiful.”
Emanuel mixed the Manhattans, faithfully following Walt’s recipe. Walt poured half his glass onto the tray near Daisy’s picture, so she’d still have her devotion. “You know, Emanuel,” he said. “It’s better she died first. She couldn’t have endured anything like these last days.”
He crawled across the blackened scoria. He dragged himself and his oxygen tank up the staircase. From the threshold, he watched the clear silhouette of the most beautiful woman in the world, waiting in darkness at the luminous window. He had returned maybe ten, twelve, twenty times, but had failed to do whatever it was he’d come to do. She was still intoning her mysterious monologue. In his wheelchair he remembered only scraps. But he moved through the door again, and froze just across the threshold, as Rivka told him that Desiderata had died, again, and yet again. He could never remember whether the door always melted away or suddenly opened, or whether just before Rivka told him again he knew what she was about to say because he had already remembered, or because there couldn’t be anything else so appalling that it would put such terror into her eyes.
Slowly now, at the far wall, the woman turned another fraction. Against the grey sky the curve of her cheek brightened. That red disk, with its circular blade, showed its edge along the horizon. When at last she turned fully and he saw her face, maybe he would have finished his quest. Whether she was death, the great goddess whom only visionaries see face to face in her full glory, or only the shadow of death in his mind, he did not know, but at least she was going to reveal herself.
The next day or the day after she showed him her profile; the next, months after Desiderata’s death, she faced three quarters. Her eyes looked past his. He could not see into them. With Emanuel and Rivka he observed Daisy’s birthday, gulping down the sweet sparkling burgundy in her memory. “You must see. My darlings, I can’t do this again.”
“Soon it will be spring,” Rivka said. “We’ll drive you to the house so you can see the trees in blossom.”
“I’m not going to live that long. I couldn’t bear all that color without her.”
Holding Daisy’s picture against his cheek, he remembered fragments of what the woman in the room must be telling him even now, a promise or maybe a prophecy: whose hands are made of glass may hold water in one and wine in the other. Not the night before but some other night, she had told him, nor, when we have asked them, have the wisest told how to name the separate colors of the moon, which I would argue have both taste and graininess, and perfume the air.
Emanuel was reading to him, but he couldn’t keep the earlier pages long enough to understand anything. Each sentence stood on its own with no history, no future. Tonight across that threshold she almost faced him. Although he could not move, he strained closer. She spoke in a low, even voice: Memory, I take it, is but the tenth part of a hero's life, and neither the mountains nor the stars gaze upon eternity. The marbles of Ecbatana are of too fine a grain to have character….
That was what he had to give up, at the very last: memory. Until he put down those last fragments held like a broken, beloved body, she would never turn to him. Though he dragged his oxygen tank towards the woman at the window, he could come no nearer. Only if he let his mind go would she shine upon him, assure him that he had been her hero, her brave pilgrim, and grant him the last, true vision.
Now he was watching television, which he could neither see nor follow. The images shot at him in isolated blurs. He would not lament it. He looked up from the screen. “Rivka,” he said, “you know the wonderful thing about getting so forgetful? Every moment comes alone, separate from every other. I never know what will happen next. It’s the most amazing adventure.”
The doctor was holding his wrist. “We can’t take care of you at home. If you want to get better, you need to be on a ventilator. May we take you to the hospital?”
“Of course not. What an outrageous idea.” It was his now. He looked out at the flowering, triumphant cliffs. “Rivka,” he said. “You’ve been so good to us. Come, kiss me. I love you so much. Please phone Emanuel to come now.”
Outside the window, the jeweled landscape wound away under its golden light. “Talk to me, please, whoever you are. There’s something I have to do, though I don’t know what it is. Read, sing, yell, do anything, just keep me awake till he gets here.” Finally Emanuel bent over the bed to kiss him. “Emanuel, darling, I love you,” he said, with his last strength, and it ran out of him. Two strangers, a man and a woman, familiar but no longer known to him, leaned over him, one on each side, and held his hands. His eyes closed. The door fell open. The woman at the casement turned, her eyes open to him, all her light revealed. As he walked, once more straight and steady, into the timeless world of that room, she smiled at him with Desiderata’s smile.
“You’ve been so long coming to me,” she said.
Weeks later Emanuel and Rivka mingled the ashes, burying them outside their parents’ window. Raising their glasses of sparkling burgundy, they looked at the freshly turned earth, and drank the sweet wine down.
But in Ecbatana, where neither the mountains nor the stars gaze upon eternity, the marbles are of too fine a grain to have character. There Walt and Daisy walked through that landscape opening out into measureless green and gold. He spoke to her of poetry and philosophy. She told him of noble acts that moved them both to tears. Once in a while, he brushed his lips across her hair, and whispered, “Desiderata, my only love.” She answered, “Gualtiero, I worship and adore you,” as she had done every day of their lives together, even at the moment of her death. Then he gave her bottom a light pinch, saying, “give me a little of this, now, my Daisy,” and she shrieked or laughed, “oh Walt, my beloved, my hero. What if they see us? Let’s go in together and make the night sing.” Under the golden trees before memory, in the flower-carpeted lanes at the end of desire, he was hers again.
As the moon cleared the horizon, Gualtiero pulled himself up the rock face. He could barely glimpse the tower. A fissure opened in the fog under his feet and dropped him with a jolt.…he could hear the teakettle whistling and her voice calling from near the window. He peeled the foil off the bouillon cube and dropped the cube into the cup.
“Walt, is something wrong? Why are you taking so long?”
“I’m pouring the hot water now, Daisy.” Again he found himself back in that long ago or alternate world, looking at the cliffs he had climbed only a moment ago. Desiderata, leaning on the battlement beside him, said, “Before it’s too late, Gualtiero, please. I need you to do this now.”
“Forgive me, Desiderata. Aren’t we both too old? What we could do sixty years ago: have we the strength now?” The moon had gone down, but the copper sun was already rising over the cliffs, which dissolved…
…and he filled the cup, stirred to dissolve the bouillon cube. He put the little bud vase on the tray and opened the screen door. He picked a chive flower, then broke off a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace from the weeds near the step. With the bud vase filled, he carried the tray into the living-room. Her walker stood near her chair. The steely lamplight gleamed over her hair. He dropped to one knee, steadying the tray on her lap. Her hand shook. Her stiff, twisted fingers could hardly take the spoon. “Let me help you, Daisy” he said, as the cliffs of that other world rolled back under his feet….
…and she pulled his hand up to her cheek, his palm against her cheekbone, his thumb stroking its curve, his forefinger resting in the deep hollow behind her ear. “Gualtiero, I worship and adore you,” she said, as she had every morning and night of the sixty years since they’d eloped together. “I know we’re too old. There’s something I failed to do. That’s why this is happening to us.” She put his hand to her lips and brushed the fingertips. “Well, we have to see it through. There’s no choice.”
The moon, a flying vessel with flickering blades, slipped under the horizon, creasing the air as if the edge of a door or a window floated behind or partly blocked it. “But if I don’t make it---”
“I didn’t hear that. No, I’m not a silly young woman: I know you may not get through. We’re both very old and very tired. We may not have much more time….”
…and on the other side of the air, he knelt and steadied the tray.
“Walt, how sweet of you to bring me flowers. It’s grown so dim: what are they?”
“Well, this one’s Queen Anne’s lace, and that’s a blue chive from the clump by the kitchen door. I haven’t weeded, and it’s lucky I didn’t. Weeds are all that’s growing there right now.”
“So it’s blue and white, your bouquet. Well, it’s pretty, weeds or not. You don’t have to hold the spoon. I can manage.” She lifted the spoon to her mouth, hand still shaking, spilling bouillon over her robe. “Walt, I’m sorry. This isn’t helping at all. It’s making me even more nauseous. Please: some tea instead?”
“Of course, my love.”
“I hate being so much trouble. I’ll be better tomorrow.”
“It’s no trouble.” He carried the tray back, relit the burner under the kettle.
“Walt, I’m so sorry to need you again. Please, help me to the bathroom?”
He turned down the burner, trudged back, bent, and hauled her up. Holding her hands closed around the walker, which wobbled wildly under her shaky grip, he labored along behind her, his arms under her armpits. She was only a small, crumpled shadow, but she weighed on his arms like a marble Victory. Settling her in the bathroom, he closed the door part way.
If he could sit down and never get up again --- If she would consent to a nurse or at least a housekeeper --- If she would let them move in with one of the children --- Even if she wouldn’t listen to him, if she would listen to Rivka or Emanuel --- But she’d said to all of them, “I didn’t hear that,” brushing necessity away like a fly. If she didn’t have to take the water pill for her blood pressure --- As soon as she was back in her chair she would need the bathroom again. Incontinence was one of the curses of old age, but half the time it was not caused by age or illness itself, but as a side effect of prescribed medications. Sometimes he could hardly get himself there in time either, but it was harder for her, waiting for him to carry her in. If she would use a wheelchair, she’d get there quicker, but she had too much fight to accept that reality.
On memory’s shifting screen as he waited, he could see her determined look, the one she’d worn the night she’d first offered herself to him, in his Greenwich Village studio. What courage she had then, in that world of their youth with its codes of feminine modesty and virtue. She had loved him against her family’s opposition, and, even more, had given herself with no thought of marriage, shy, determined, and gallant all at the same time. And then the sweetness, undressing her, and then the silk slide of her skin, and the sudden heat. And that silvery hour before dawn, when the alarm rang. Hurriedly they dressed, and he took her home on the subway and sneaked her in. It had taken months to persuade her to elope. She had insisted that marriage would trap them both.
“Walt, dear, can you help me up?” He pulled her up, tidied her, and lugged her out. As always, she looked away. She hated his seeing her like this in the bathroom with no dignity. Back near the window he eased her into her chair, then gave her bottom a light pinch. “Oh Walt,” she said, touching his cheek with her twisted hand. “What a naughty man you are, my love.”
“Daisy, dear, usually you say, not in front of the children. But I can, now; I can do anything I want, because Emanuel’s in Hartford, and Rivka won’t be here till the weekend. Tonight I’ll seduce you again, the way I did when we were young.”
“Walt, I worship and adore you.”
He rested both hands on her face, his thumbs on her cheeks, the forefingers brushing behind her ears where childhood mastoid surgery had scooped deep hollows. “Let me get your tea, my sweetheart.” In the kitchen, he turned the burner back up. A moment’s dizziness assailed him. He closed his eyes.
“Walt, are you there? Is the tea ready?”
“It’s heating now.”
“I can’t hear you. I’m cold suddenly, so cold. Please, can you bring the blanket?”
“I’ll be right there.” The kettle began to growl, not yet at full boil, but rising fast like the snarl of distant aircraft. Leaning against the counter top, he waited for his weakness to pass. “Oh dear, dear, dear,” he whispered, as close as he could bring himself to uttering a thumping great profanity….
…He couldn’t keep going. On hands and knees, he hauled himself from one outcrop to the next across the jagged scoria. The air was cracked by that almost invisible fracture, a hinge or the edge of something. A knife-edge shadow sliced across the ground. He raised his head. The tower loomed, iron black, one seamless polished sheet from ground to sky. An oak door stood ajar, opening on a spiral staircase....
…The door hung, creaking in the wind. Dropping his book-bag, he ran into the living-room. His mother sat bent over, hands covering her eyes.
“What’s wrong? Where’s your medicine?”
“It won’t help.”
“Well, Daddy’s route ends Fridays. He’ll be home tonight, and will get a new doctor.”
“He isn’t coming home, Walt. He wrote. He’s found someone, and wants a divorce. What will we do? I can’t take care of myself now, let alone you and your sister.”
He leaned forward behind his mother’s chair, stroking her cheek. He wanted someone infinitely protective to hold him in her arms, but there was nobody like that here. Not since the cancer, anyway. “We don’t need that crummy old sardine salesman. I’m a big boy now. I can take care of you.”
They’d pieced together a patchwork to support them, early mornings, late afternoons, nights, weekends: pharmacy and grocery delivery boy, and, until his voice changed and he lost his beautiful, clear soprano, paid choir boy in the cathedral. After his mother’s death, he’d repaired railway signals to put himself and his sister through college. Then there was the party in the Village, the dark-haired girl in her flapper dress, seated at the window with the light framing her from behind, one arm resting along the back of her chair, one foot thrust slightly forward, her ankle at just the right slant to catch his eye. He’d sat down cross-legged in front of her. When she’d asked if he’d like to bring a chair over, he’d said, “No, I’m an ankle man….”
…He felt his age in every bone. This was an errand for some young hero, not for a man past ninety with a leaking heart valve. The dank stones of the spiral staircase oozed. Outside, the tower, with its seven walls, had been forged of one single freezing sheet of iron, but within, it was rubble with no mortar to hold it. Back home Desiderata would wait for him till the end of the world, simply not hearing the possibility of failure, waving it away as she waved any obstacle….
“…Walt, what time is it?”
“It’s cocktail time, my love.” He restocked the bud vase with a spray of goldenrod. The tray held the cocktail shaker, a pitcher of ice water, two slices of toast spread with mashed sardines, and her pills in their saucer: prednisone, water pill, two codeines. Next to the shaker was her glass filled mostly with water, because no matter how desperately she wanted alcohol, she couldn’t mix it with codeine. He poured a dash of Manhattan into her glass, and a copious amount into his own.
“That blossom’s so pretty. What color is it?”
“It’s yellow.”
“Yes, I can just make it out. What kind of flower?”
“It’s goldenrod, my darling. I haven’t anything better to give you.”
“There isn’t anything better than what you give me. Walt, I worship and adore you.” She sipped at her cocktail, spilling most of it on the toast. “Remember our old house, the Tudor house?”
“Yes, my love. What about it? The kitchen? The garden? Nights when the children slept?”
“Those, certainly. First, you reading aloud to me, and then in bed when the night sang, with the moon floating over us. Those first weekends: remember how you painted the children’s rooms with giraffes and elephants, like a ring of carousel animals on the walls, and how I held the brushes for you? I held my hands over yours when you painted, so that I could feel us work together. I did so love your hands.”
“We didn’t have children yet, not even started. Yet there we were, making everything ready. Weren’t we silly?”
“I think hope is always silly. Think of the children we’ll have, you said. Were we crazy? During the war, working three jobs, commuting into the City, then upstate, then back home to work late nights and into the weekends. I know it was the war effort, and you were too old to serve, so did that instead. But still….Walt, you must have been so tired. I never thought: did I push you too hard?”
“Just hard enough: we pulled through, after all. And we all had to do something. I used to think of you kneeling, weeding ---remember your victory garden? --- while I was driving from one job to the next. I told myself that was your share, and I could do mine.”
“I shouldn’t let it worry me so.” She had dropped some sardine on her robe, and picked at it. “I helped you a little, Walt, didn’t I?”
“Daisy, my love, you did everything. You gave up your job at The Brooklyn Eagle that you’d been so proud of. The sheets and shirts I felt so terrible that we couldn’t afford to send out, and you hand-washed and ironed them. You did hard, physical labor, while I sat at a desk. Why, what would I have done without your devotion?”
She held out her shaking glass. “Give me a little devotion now, then. From your glass. Please, Walt. I’ve spilled all of it.”
He poured her a dash of alcohol from his glass. “Is that good? Shall I give you more?”
“Is there more? Or have I used it all up?”
“You’ll never use it up. You know that.” He poured water, and a small dash of his cocktail.
“Walt, this is awful. I need to go to the bathroom again. Please don’t be---”
“What should I not be, Daisy, dear?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t. I’m so ashamed….”
…Breathing raggedly at the top of the tower Gualtiero stopped outside an arched doorway. Through solid oak panels barred shut he saw into the round room. Across the room a casement window opened upon a winding, golden terraced landscape. It looked nothing like the blasted waste through which he had just toiled, although he must have passed through this too on his way.
He was not physically in the room and the door stayed shut, but through its oak panels he saw a woman seated with her back to him before the open window. All he could see of her was the black silhouette of her hair against the greenish-grey light of the before-dawn sky. Even with her face hidden, she was surely the most beautiful woman in the world. Her voice dropped quietly into the space, calm, deliberate as stone. He caught clearly only one sentence, neither the beginning nor the end: In the lives of the heroes of Ecbatana, there is room for neither memory nor desire, for what have the mountains to do with the sea….
“…Walt, dear, are you there? I feel so sick. Maybe something hot to chase away these chills? Could you make some tea?”
He leaned forward, pushing himself upright with his hands on the bed-frame. In the kitchen in the shivering night, waiting for the water to boil, he wondered who on earth the heroes of Ecbatana might be. Whoever they were, he needed them. He had never run away from an obligation in his life, not like that scoundrel, his father. Just a teenager himself, he had seen his mother through to her death. He had seen his sister through to adulthood. He had been as steadfast and cheerful under fire as any man could be. But he had no strength left. The fate Daisy most feared was to be sent to a nursing home where she would have to wait for attention. Nobody would have the patience to care for her. When she felt nauseated or cold, nobody would jump up immediately to make tea. At the thought of this, the weakness roared over him again with the force of a fleet of aircraft, the hot backwind beating down on his face. He held on, bent over the counter, whispering, “oh, dear, dear, dear,” while his heart pounded.
He knew the enemy, here in the kitchen as he stood doubled over. The iron challenger in clanking armor strode up the driveway. Daisy lay terrified that something was happening to him, while he scrabbled in the odds-and-ends drawer for the nitroglycerin, too weak to turn the heat down. He did not need some legendary hero to save him, with a sword and a gigantic horse: he who had never in his life ridden a horse. He needed an everyday, real-life hero, groping for the nitroglycerin pills when heart arrhythmia ambushed him. Somewhere there had to be something to carry him, here, in his ordinary house with its ordinary garden that he no longer had the ordinary strength to weed. He needed one gleam of reachable splendor to come down from Ecbatana, to touch him on the shoulder not with a sword but with one of the household implements he knew how to use, a soup ladle or a can opener, to say: With this touch I give you honor, I give you nobility, I give you courage, I give you generosity of spirit; from this moment no challenge can defeat you.
He straightened himself, not sure if he was still in the tower, climbing the staircase, or still in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil, and leaned against the countertop, whispering to the moon, and whatever angels and demons might be waiting for him, his war cry, “Oh dear, dear, dear.” Stumbling back with the tray, he said, “Here, my Daisy, my flower, my brave girl. I’m sorry I don’t have a diamond crown or a kingdom to bring you. I’m sorry all I have is a cup of tea, but you know it has the whole world in it.”
“Walt, my dearest, I’m sorry I don’t have a kingdom for you either. And I’m so sorry I woke you. You’re the best man in the world, you know you are. And it isn’t the tea. Sometimes when I’ve been lying awake too long, and can’t hear you breathing, I get so frightened. Please go back to sleep now.”
“And here I hoped you woke me to enjoy my lecherous attentions, at least, after you’ve finished your tea.”
“Well, tomorrow night I will. I just have to feel better….Tonight will you read to me?”
“If I can see the words. Sometimes they blur.”
…He ran against the tower door, but it would not open, though he could see into the room through the melting oak. The woman sat at the window, her back to him but her head had turned slightly. The moon gilded the shadow of her cheek and the line of her jaw….
…The alarm should have gone off. He should dress, and take Daisy home. He lay on his elbow, looking down at her, reached across, and turned it off before it could start. Either that woke her, or she had already been awake but not letting on. “What are you doing, Walt?”
“No, Daisy, what am I not doing? I’m not taking you home. We’re getting married.”
“You know I don’t believe in it. We can love each other without all that. We should stay together willingly, not because we’re stuck with each other. I want to be your equal, your partner. I don’t want to diminish into your wife or get trapped in a house.”
“Sweetheart, think of the children we’ll have. We need to get married for their sake. I promise it won’t be a trap.”
“My family will come after us.”
“We’ll trick them. Look, Daisy, we’ll run off to Jersey and send telegrams. They’ll think we’re there. Then we’ll sneak right back and check into a hotel. They’ll never find us.”
And there they stood with a row of other couples, as the city clerk went down the line, a wound-up automaton stopping in front of each couple to mumble, unromantic as a vacuum cleaner, “I now pronounce you man and wife, I now pronounce you man and wife, I now pronounce you man and wife.” They laid their false trail to Atlantic City, then rushed back. At the speakeasy, the waiter poured out bootleg sparkling burgundy, assuring them it was the finest French wine to be had. Laughing and triumphant, they drank the intolerably sweet stuff down.
In the living-room Desiderata kept watch across the snow, peering across their driveway for the glint of enemy troops: an ambulance or a rescue vehicle.
“Mother,” said Emanuel. “You should let us hire a housekeeper or a nurse.”
“I didn’t hear you,” Daisy answered. He couldn’t know how true that was. She had never let anyone know. Although childhood infections and mastoid surgeries had destroyed much of her hearing, Daisy had concealed her infirmity. She taught herself to read lips, to figure out what people must have said. With combative vigor, she refuted, not their actual arguments, but what she guessed they had said, pieced out by what she did catch. If they resisted she simply said, “I’m not going to hear that,” then reiterated her own position.
She had not surrendered one stone. Now, if she hadn’t had Walt to protect, she would have faced death down, just as during the war she had faced down those other adversaries: the laundry, the garden, the house, the children, even that relentless adversary, love. It had felt like a death: her newspaper job that she’d worked so hard for, gone, no longer a journalist but just a housewife, the marriage she had resisted turned into a prison, just as she’d feared—not her fault, nor Walt’s, but still, it had happened. She’d faced down years of it, sometimes in despair, sometimes in silent fury, terrified that her love for him would turn to rage. Compared to that, what was blindness, heart failure, dizziness, crippling pain? Trivial: she could brush it all away. Reality? A moth: be gone right now. But the silence ---
She couldn’t hear him breathing. He must have died. Shaking, she called, and when he woke, sent him to fetch anything, the first thing she thought of, a magic crystal from the tower, a blanket, a cup of tea. She could have done without any of that. But when he was gone too long, as a few minutes ago, when she couldn’t hear or see him moving, she needed to know he was alive. It was himself she needed him to bring.
The tea hadn’t helped. She’d sent it back, and then felt how heavily he fell back into bed. He must be asleep. Lying on her side, she could just make out his labored breathing. In the center of the ceiling the blades of the night carousel whirled its stampeding herds. While she’d been waiting for the tea or whatever she asked for, she had felt that other sharper fear, that he could not keep on, that if she did not go on needing him to take care of her, he would let go and die.
“Walt, please don’t mind my bothering you. It’s so stuffy here. Can you open the window?”
“Of course, my love. It’s no bother.”
Gualtiero leaned against the stones, waiting for his heart to beat again. Outside, the red disk of dawn was rising like the blade of a circular saw. It was months since he’d last stood here. After all, he had not been equal to the test. He must have collapsed. They’d cut him open, put in a pacemaker. He’d come back not to his own home but to Rivka’s. Walt and Daisy had taken over the whole downstairs. Weekends, Emanuel drove over and built wheelchair ramps and bathroom handrails. They had nurse’s aides now, pushing their wheelchairs, helping them to the bathroom, positioning his oxygen tank, and feeding Daisy. They wouldn’t let him take care of her. He was no use to her or to anyone.
She swallowed her codeine tablets, washing them down with cocktail-flavored water, then reached for his hand. “Please, Walt, don’t frighten me like that ever again. Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t well? I didn’t know. I always meant to die first. I didn’t think it would take so long. You rascal, don’t you dare go first.”
“I don’t dare. I couldn’t bear you grieving. Somehow we have to die together. For the one that’s left, it will be beyond endurance.”
“Walt, how awful. I hadn’t thought of that. Just give me a little more time. Don’t leave me yet, promise.”
“I’m doing my best, Daisy. Shall I pour you a little more?”
“Yes, Walt, dear. Give me some of your devotion. I do so need it.”
He poured a few drops from his glass into hers, spilling most of it. His sight had worsened, and he no longer had the breath to read aloud. After dinner, Rivka read to them as they sat in their wheelchairs, holding hands. Sometimes it all blurred, and he couldn’t remember anything he’d just heard.
Desiderata braced her back against her wheelchair, and stared stubbornly into the darkness. Walt made sure the nurses were looking, then leaned over to give Daisy’s bottom a quick pinch.
“Oh, Walt, my love, not in front of the nurses! Whatever will they think?”
“And how else are they to see that I’m in love with the most beautiful woman in the world?”
The house was freezing. They piled quilts over her, but it did no good. Lying with her back against him, Daisy pressed herself closer to Walt under the covers, holding his hand hard to her cheek. “Walt, my darling, you’re my hero. I worship and adore you. Don’t ever forget that. Please.” A sudden ice storm swept her down. The moon went out.
In panic Gualtiero rammed his shoulder against the tower door. With a harsh groan, it gave, and he fell through the doorway, his oxygen tank falling with him. Inside, the room was just as he’d seen it through the oak--- thick night like a croak, and beyond the window the green light of another planet. People swarmed; a mob poured through the door. “Rivka, what’s happened? What’s all this racket?”
“Daddy, darling, she died. It happened last night while we slept.”
Someone slid a tray table over his wheelchair. He could just make out her wedding picture in its frame. Where was she then? He sent the nurse to fetch his daughter. “Where’s your mother, where are you hiding her? This isn’t like you, Rivka. I expected better of you. You shouldn’t punish me. Whatever I did wrong, just tell me, and I’ll never do it again. Just let Daisy come back. Don’t keep her from me. I’ll be good now. I promise. Please.”
“Daddy, darling, you’ve forgotten. She died.”
“I can’t see her picture. Is that it?”
“Here: bend closer. Can you see it now?”
“No, not well, it doesn’t look like her. My darling: she was so beautiful.”
Emanuel mixed the Manhattans, faithfully following Walt’s recipe. Walt poured half his glass onto the tray near Daisy’s picture, so she’d still have her devotion. “You know, Emanuel,” he said. “It’s better she died first. She couldn’t have endured anything like these last days.”
He crawled across the blackened scoria. He dragged himself and his oxygen tank up the staircase. From the threshold, he watched the clear silhouette of the most beautiful woman in the world, waiting in darkness at the luminous window. He had returned maybe ten, twelve, twenty times, but had failed to do whatever it was he’d come to do. She was still intoning her mysterious monologue. In his wheelchair he remembered only scraps. But he moved through the door again, and froze just across the threshold, as Rivka told him that Desiderata had died, again, and yet again. He could never remember whether the door always melted away or suddenly opened, or whether just before Rivka told him again he knew what she was about to say because he had already remembered, or because there couldn’t be anything else so appalling that it would put such terror into her eyes.
Slowly now, at the far wall, the woman turned another fraction. Against the grey sky the curve of her cheek brightened. That red disk, with its circular blade, showed its edge along the horizon. When at last she turned fully and he saw her face, maybe he would have finished his quest. Whether she was death, the great goddess whom only visionaries see face to face in her full glory, or only the shadow of death in his mind, he did not know, but at least she was going to reveal herself.
The next day or the day after she showed him her profile; the next, months after Desiderata’s death, she faced three quarters. Her eyes looked past his. He could not see into them. With Emanuel and Rivka he observed Daisy’s birthday, gulping down the sweet sparkling burgundy in her memory. “You must see. My darlings, I can’t do this again.”
“Soon it will be spring,” Rivka said. “We’ll drive you to the house so you can see the trees in blossom.”
“I’m not going to live that long. I couldn’t bear all that color without her.”
Holding Daisy’s picture against his cheek, he remembered fragments of what the woman in the room must be telling him even now, a promise or maybe a prophecy: whose hands are made of glass may hold water in one and wine in the other. Not the night before but some other night, she had told him, nor, when we have asked them, have the wisest told how to name the separate colors of the moon, which I would argue have both taste and graininess, and perfume the air.
Emanuel was reading to him, but he couldn’t keep the earlier pages long enough to understand anything. Each sentence stood on its own with no history, no future. Tonight across that threshold she almost faced him. Although he could not move, he strained closer. She spoke in a low, even voice: Memory, I take it, is but the tenth part of a hero's life, and neither the mountains nor the stars gaze upon eternity. The marbles of Ecbatana are of too fine a grain to have character….
That was what he had to give up, at the very last: memory. Until he put down those last fragments held like a broken, beloved body, she would never turn to him. Though he dragged his oxygen tank towards the woman at the window, he could come no nearer. Only if he let his mind go would she shine upon him, assure him that he had been her hero, her brave pilgrim, and grant him the last, true vision.
Now he was watching television, which he could neither see nor follow. The images shot at him in isolated blurs. He would not lament it. He looked up from the screen. “Rivka,” he said, “you know the wonderful thing about getting so forgetful? Every moment comes alone, separate from every other. I never know what will happen next. It’s the most amazing adventure.”
The doctor was holding his wrist. “We can’t take care of you at home. If you want to get better, you need to be on a ventilator. May we take you to the hospital?”
“Of course not. What an outrageous idea.” It was his now. He looked out at the flowering, triumphant cliffs. “Rivka,” he said. “You’ve been so good to us. Come, kiss me. I love you so much. Please phone Emanuel to come now.”
Outside the window, the jeweled landscape wound away under its golden light. “Talk to me, please, whoever you are. There’s something I have to do, though I don’t know what it is. Read, sing, yell, do anything, just keep me awake till he gets here.” Finally Emanuel bent over the bed to kiss him. “Emanuel, darling, I love you,” he said, with his last strength, and it ran out of him. Two strangers, a man and a woman, familiar but no longer known to him, leaned over him, one on each side, and held his hands. His eyes closed. The door fell open. The woman at the casement turned, her eyes open to him, all her light revealed. As he walked, once more straight and steady, into the timeless world of that room, she smiled at him with Desiderata’s smile.
“You’ve been so long coming to me,” she said.
Weeks later Emanuel and Rivka mingled the ashes, burying them outside their parents’ window. Raising their glasses of sparkling burgundy, they looked at the freshly turned earth, and drank the sweet wine down.
But in Ecbatana, where neither the mountains nor the stars gaze upon eternity, the marbles are of too fine a grain to have character. There Walt and Daisy walked through that landscape opening out into measureless green and gold. He spoke to her of poetry and philosophy. She told him of noble acts that moved them both to tears. Once in a while, he brushed his lips across her hair, and whispered, “Desiderata, my only love.” She answered, “Gualtiero, I worship and adore you,” as she had done every day of their lives together, even at the moment of her death. Then he gave her bottom a light pinch, saying, “give me a little of this, now, my Daisy,” and she shrieked or laughed, “oh Walt, my beloved, my hero. What if they see us? Let’s go in together and make the night sing.” Under the golden trees before memory, in the flower-carpeted lanes at the end of desire, he was hers again.
About the author
Judith Johnson’s first book, Uranium Poems, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. There have been seven more since then; the most recent two, The Ice Lizard and Cities of Mathematics and Desire, were published by Sheep Meadow Press. Her short fiction collection, The Life of Riot, was published by Atheneum and has just been reissued by FictionXPress as The Fourth Annual Greater New York Revolving Door Crisis. Individual stories have won various prizes including a feminist satire which, surprisingly, won a Playboy fiction prize, and a story which won Nimrod's 2012 Katherine Ann Porter short fiction prize.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.