Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(21)

It will be a frigid evening. Bets are that Reynolds boils him an egg and then plasters on a glitter face and goes dancing.

He let himself get angry; he shouldn’t do that. It’s bad for the cardiovascular. He needs to think about something else. His poem, the poem he’s writing. Not in the so-called study, he can’t write in there. He shuffles into the kitchen, retrieves his notebook from the drawer in the telephone table where he likes to keep it, locates a pencil, then makes his way out the garden door and down the three tiled steps to the patio and carefully across it. The patio is tiled too, and can be slippery around the pool. He achieves the deck chair he’s been aiming for, lowers himself down.

The fallen leaves revolve in the eddy; maybe Maria will come in silently in her denim shorts with her skimmer and skim them out.

Maria skims the dying leaves.

Are they souls? Is one of them my soul?

Is she the Angel of Death, with her dark hair,

with her darkness, come to gather me in?





Faded wandering soul, eddying in this cold pool,

So long the accomplice of that fool, my body,

Where will you land? On what bare shore?

Will you be nothing but a dead leaf? Or …



No. Too much like Whitman. And Maria’s just a nice, ordinary high school girl making a few extra bucks, dime a dozen, nothing special. Hardly a nymphet, hardly the beckoning sapsucker from “Death in Venice.” How about “Death in Miami”? Sounds like a TV cop drama. Dead ends, dead ends.

Still, he likes the idea of Maria as the Angel of Death. He’s about due for one of those. He’d rather see an angel at his dying moment than nothing at all.

He closes his eyes.



Now he’s back in the park, with Richard the Third. He’s had two paper cupfuls out of the martini thermos, he needs to pee. But it’s the middle of a scene: Richard, in leather gear and carrying an outsized whip, is accosting Lady Anne, who’s escorting the bier of her murdered husband. Lady Anne has been costumed in an SM fetishist outfit; while performing their venomous duet they take turns setting their boots on each other’s necks. It’s preposterous, but when you come to think of it, it all fits. He skewers her husbuddy, she spits at him, he offers to let her stab him, and so forth. Shakespeare is so kinky. Was ever woman in this fashion won? Check the box for Yes.

“I’m off to take a leak,” he says to Rey when Richard has finished bragging about his conquest of Lady Anne.

“It’s back there by the hot dog stand,” says Reynolds. “Shhh!”

“Real men don’t piss in porta-potties,” he says. “Real men piss in the bushes.”

“I’d better come with you,” Reynolds whispers. “You’ll get lost.”

“Leave me alone,” he says.

“At least take the flashlight.”

But he declined the flashlight as well. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. He ambles off into the darkness, fumbles with his zipper. He can hardly see a thing. At least he’s missed his feet: no warm socks this time. Relieved, he zips and turns, ready to navigate back. But where is he? Branches brush his face: he’s lost track of the direction. Worse: the foliage may be filled with thugs, waiting to mug such a witless target. Shit! How to summon Reynolds? He refuses to wail for help. He must not panic.

A hand seizes his arm, and he wakes with a start. His heart’s pounding, he’s breathing quickly. Calm down, he tells himself. It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem.



The hand must have belonged to Reynolds. She must have followed him into the shrubbery, with the flashlight. He can’t remember, but that’s how it has to have been, because otherwise he wouldn’t be here in this deck chair, would he? He would never have made it back.

How long was he asleep? It’s twilight. Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower. Just a song at twilight. What a Victorian word; nobody says twilight any more. Still to us at twilight comes Love’s sweet something or other.

Time for a drink.

“Reynolds,” he calls. No answer. She’s abandoned him. Serves him right. He didn’t behave very well this afternoon. But it was enjoyable, not behaving well. You can’t talk to women like that any more. Sod that, who says he can’t? He’s retired, he can’t be fired. He chuckles to himself.

He levers himself out of the deck chair, points himself towards the steps up to the house. Slippery on the tiles, and it’s so dim out here in the yard. Crepuscular, he thinks: it sounds like a crayfish. A spiky, hard-shelled word, with pincers.

Here are the steps. Lift the right foot. He misses, cascades, impacts, abrades.

Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?

“Oh my God!” says Reynolds when she finds him. “Gavvy! I can’t leave you alone for a minute! Now look what you’ve done!” She bursts into tears.



She’s managed to drag him onto the deck chair and prop him in place with the two pillows; she’s wiped off some of the blood and stuck a wet dishtowel onto his head. Now she’s on the phone trying to locate an ambulance. “You can’t put me on hold!” she’s saying. “He’s had a stroke, or else … This is supposed to be an emergency service! Oh f*ck!”

Gavin lies between the pillows, with something neither cold nor hot trickling down his face. It isn’t twilight after all because the sun’s just setting, a glorious pinkish red. The palm fronds are waving gently; the circulation pump is throbbing, or is that his pulse? Now the field darkens, and Constance is hovering in the middle of it; the old, withered Constance with the mask-like makeup job, the pale, wrinkled face he saw on the screen. She looks at him with bewilderment.