Endless Things by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page A

sound. “You know?"
    "Yes. I do."
    "You have a warm heart,” she said. “A real little steam engine in there. I always thought."
    "Oh,” he said. “Well. I don't know. I just feel that I failed her. She went over to them because she was in trouble, in real trouble. Fatal trouble almost, really. Yes, I think so. There was a night, a night on the hill, in her car, when she. Well. Never mind. But I couldn't see, couldn't admit that she was in such trouble, and do something for her. Something. I couldn't."
    Charis listened, saying nothing.
    "So how can I call it love? When I did nothing?"
    "Hey,” Charis said softly. “It's not like she was counting on you.” She studied him. “Was she?"
    "No."
    "There was no deal, was there?” She crossed her thin arms before her, cold in her doorway. “There's got to be a deal made. You guys never had a deal like that, did you?"
    "No."
    "See?"
    He must have looked unconvinced, because she took his lapel, looking up, her golden eyes. “You're a good guy,” she said. “You ought to get somebody good. But Pierce.” She waited till he looked at her. “You got to make a deal, and make it stick. You and her. You got to know what deal you've made, and it's got to have something for you, and something for her. You got to deal. Even I know that."
    She tugged his high head down toward hers to kiss his cheek. He thought of the last time he and she had parted, when money had changed hands too. And a kiss and an embrace that was like having all your lost treasure returned to you at once, and at once taken away again; and then the door closed and locked.
    A deal. He had certainly never struck a deal with Charis, though possibly he had assumed she had issued terms, terms that he thought he had accepted: that wasn't the same thing as a deal, he guessed.
    He hadn't told Charis that he had asked Rose to marry him, one night, one endless night. It was all he could think of to do, and it was not in order to rescue her, but himself: if she could say yes, then her soul would not be theirs, she would not be their captive forever and his own soul die. That was the deal he offered. She didn't take it.
    It turns out—he'd read the literature, actually—that such affairs as theirs was don't often flourish or last long, because at bottom what the two folles in the folie à deux want from each other is impossible to have, indeed what each one needs makes it impossible to give what the other wants. For A wants B to place herself—say her just for instance—entirely in his power, willingly, in each instance: to say Yes with all her being and desire. But B needs A to deprive her of her will, take away her power of assent or dissent, so that what is done is not done by her at all.
    So what they do, A and B, is to pretend, for each other's sake, on each other's behalf: A pretends to unfeeling cruelty, B to resistance and ultimate capitulation. And, sly game players that they often are, they can go on long pretending, but the farther they press the game, the closer comes the moment when the contradiction becomes clear to each of them, not always the same moment for both unfortunately. That's why it's so often A who in the end is on his knees, and saying Please please, and B whose eyes are cold and turned away, wondering why she's there.
    Poor A, poor B.
    In the street it smelled of snow coming. He turned toward the subway, closing his coat with his right hand, pocketing his left. The little figurine—he had already forgotten it was there—slipped into his fingers, and the sudden touch of her ivory flesh was mild and pacifying. For the next months she lay there, he felt her placid curves amid the loose pence and marks and lire, the maps and subway tickets; when his trip was done and he hung the old coat on a hook, she remained. The winter after that he got a new coat, a wadded parka like everyone else's, and not until the old coat was gathered up one day with other things for the Salvation Army did another