The Heavens Page 4

  “Queens,” she said. “Yes, I like Queens. Let’s go get an apartment now.”

  They found Zazie (the dog) and took her out for a walk, pretending they were going out to get an apartment now, and walked in silence all the way down to Sixty-First, just happy. At Sixty-First, they stopped in front of a jewelry store that already had Christmas decorations up in October, and Ben was looking at the tinsel and lights and diamond rings and feeling a massive euphoria, believing in engagement rings for the first time, because if he had to buy Kate a diamond to prove his love, he’d buy the fucking diamond, even if it was a stupid waste of money and a relic of bride price. He’d buy it just to throw away the money for Kate. He’d buy a white elephant, just to say This big! Maybe he should buy her a literal elephant. Kate would probably prefer the elephant.

  Kate turned to him and said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Really?” He laughed. “No way.”

  “Yes. But they didn’t just put up the Christmas decorations. They left them up all year.”

  Ben laughed again and agreed he’d been thinking that. Then they walked a little farther and stopped at the first pet-friendly hotel they found. Their first real bed: and it was not so much the sex as the falling asleep, the drowsy wondering if he was making a mistake, the wanting to panic and enjoying it all so much.

  She dropped off first, with a child’s ease, like stepping through an open door, and he lay breathing into her hair and trying to believe it would all work out. If it was love, that happened to a lot of people. There was no reason for doubt. Still, the anomaly was there—like something heavy she had slipped into his hand, a stone he’d taken and put into his pocket without looking. As if she’d said, “Don’t look at this, or you’ll lose me forever.” He had put it in his pocket. It was probably a stone.

  6

  Then in the dream, she was waking up. There was the weariness familiar from all her dreams; she was Emilia and she wanted to fall back asleep. Outside, a rooster was crowing, shrieking with a lunatic fervor, nagging her awake, though its voice came only dimly. The chickens were two streets away. They were the royal chickens at Whitehall Palace. In the distance, the bells of two different churches were ringing, tolling, on and on.

  By stages, it ceased to be a dream. It was actual cold on her face, real morning light on her real eyelids. The moment was still and dull, as no dream was. She opened her eyes.

  She was lying in a too-soft bed, walled in on all four sides by curtains. Close to her face, the curtains had a smell of dust and winter. She tugged them, and they opened easily to show a low plaster ceiling, a narrow brick hearth whose fire had died to ash. The floor was strewn with rushes: a shaggy carpet of pale dry grasses with a silvery sprinkling of lavender. Emilia saw them with a bodily satisfaction. She knew where the lavender was grown, the eastern garden where she’d first smoked a pipe of tobacco. She remembered sitting on the rushes, breaking them in her hands to help her think. She remembered a host of things she’d never known before, Emilia things from Emilia’s head.

  This is the dream, Kate thought. This is me in the dream. This is why I’ve been so happy.

  She struggled to sit, and her breath squeezed thin. Her belly was stretched and squashed at once, the heft of it hot and alive against her arm. Then her insides woke, a kicking that snagged at her ribs, and made her want to argue with it. Her breasts sore and aware. She was pregnant. This is why I’ve been so happy.

  Then she held still to know more: a snow of information that settled in important flakes and joined to form a new terrain. It wasn’t the moon. It was Longditch, London. It was the new house, leased from a clothier, the fashionable house near Whitehall Palace. The Queen wasn’t in London now; there was plague. That was why Emilia’s husband was absent; he was traveling with the court. It wasn’t fall, as it was in New York, but March. Anno Domini 1593. A misfortunate year, a plague year; all the places of entertainment closed and the gentlefolk frightened out of town, although by God’s grace there was no war. Emilia let the news accumulate and was easy, the child inside her a lively ballast, the covers warm.

  As she blinked and remembered, a mouse appeared on the floor by the hearth. Its movement startled her; then its existence startled her. It was jarringly identical to the mice that infested Kate’s apartment in Brooklyn: a perfect twenty-first-century mouse. It nosed importantly among the strewn rushes, just as a Brooklyn mouse would nose importantly along the linoleum.

  Then she was Kate, amazed. The mouse crept along the floor, undeniably alive. It was real. It was alive and real.

  This had never been a dream. It was the past.

  A step came in the hall outside, a slipper scuffing on wood. The mouse underwent a blinking paroxysm of fear and darted under a painted chest. Emilia sat forward, half understanding, half moved by habit. She called nervously (and felt the intention of it, felt it in her throat, was surprised by her grave and musical voice): “Is it Mary there?” The step paused. For a breath, Emilia was self-consciously aware of not exactly being Emilia. Then she thought of what she needed to say. In the queer dream manner, she called, “Prithee, come and light the fire, child. ’Tis cold as the moon here.”

  There was the sound of a wooden pail being set down, the odd hollow resonance of its water. The door came open, squeaking. Mary appeared and was a tiny, pink-faced girl of about thirteen. She wore a grubby cap, but her dress was clean, full skirted, peacock blue. To Kate, she looked like a little girl in costume for a school play. To Emilia, the grubby cap was annoying, was an old, frustrating story. Mary fiddled with her cap and her hands all in soot; she was a dirty sort of housemaid.

  Mary curtsied, so rapidly it looked like a missed step, then went to the hearth and took a poker to the ashes, rooting and uncovering a slurry of embers, orange and luminous, as startling as a snake. She planted a few twigs into the brightness with a delicate precision like legerdemain. Flames grew instantly along their flanks, and Mary hoisted and positioned two logs on top. There was the scent of heat but not the feel of it yet, Mary’s lively stink within it; and now Emilia recognized her own body’s smell, its tired perfumes complicated by sweat and the sourness of leaking breasts. All real.

  And within it was a burgeoning importance, the tugging suggestion of a thing Emilia needed to do. It was something in the framing of the scene, in its shape. She was here to … it was on the tip of her tongue. It wasn’t about the baby or the plague. It wasn’t about the Queen. She felt she had known it all her life. It was … she almost knew.

  Meanwhile, she gazed at Mary’s smudged face with a proprietorial affection that was Emilia’s, that wasn’t like anything Kate ever felt. And now Mary looked back, raising her chin in preemptive stubbornness, and said, “If it please you, the moon’s not cold.”

  For a moment, Emilia was caught off guard. She answered carefully, “How, the moon not cold?”

  “Madam, you was saying, ’tis cold as the moon here. But the moon is closer to God. So ’twill be warm enough. I was thinking, madam.”

  “Ah, God is warm? He warms the moon?”

  “To be sure. God’s good. And very large He is. He can warm all the heavens.”

  Emilia laughed, surprised, and Mary glowed with intellectual satisfaction, rocking slightly on her heels. Mary was—Emilia now remembered—a great thinker of thoughts, who suffered when she wasn’t allowed to hold forth. It was why she’d been sent here from Hunsdon’s household, where her blather couldn’t be tolerated.

  Now Mary said, with growing importance, “’Tis hell, what’s cold. My brother says hell is hot with hellfire, but I say it must be a cold flame in hell, what burns but cannot warm. I knew a priest said something like. So ’tisn’t only my fancy. It is true teaching, madam.”

  “Melancholy thoughts,” said Emilia. “What brings thee to such black musings, imp?”

  “Faith, if the pestilence be not enough!”

  Then Mary chattered on, describing hell and telling how her own mother died in sin; and Mary
prayed that her mother be not in hell, but if she be there, ’twas a question to Mary if it be a daughter’s duty to be good or sin wickedly and join her mother, for we are told we must honor our parents, and ’twould be poor honor to abandon them in hell. And ’twas a very present thought in this plaguey town, this town where only worms could smile. Why, even the cats had fled London’s sickness. So Mary had heard, and she wouldn’t wonder at it, for beasts were often wise when men were foolish. Mary talked on and Emilia listened, feeling nervously that a clue must emerge, while the fire rose bravely in the hearth, Mary plucked at her cap, the window rattled in and out in gusts of breeze. Some phrases in Mary’s speech prickled at Emilia’s mind and stuck like burrs: my cousin … wiser that we flee … that she gave my father horns. At last Mary fell silent, gazing at the fire reprovingly, gloomily, as if she saw her mother shivering there. She picked up the poker and jabbed a log resentfully, biting her lip.

  “Yet why am I here?” said Emilia hoarsely. “Canst thou not tell me, imp?”

  Mary scoffed. “Why we be here, ’tis for your belly being too great to travel. So you said. But I say ’twill be no favor to a baby if London’s miasmas be his first breath. And my aunt once rode five days when her belly was greater than—”

  Then Mary caught herself. She rose to her feet with the stiffness of any thirteen-year-old balked by adult stupidity and turned to set the poker back in its hook. Emilia now noticed the poker’s handle, shaped like the head of a salamander but with human ears. And for a moment, the logs and flames behind Mary formed a ghastly skyline. It was a jagged city of fire and cinders, a writhing apparition of a dead world.

  There was a stabbing lurch in Emilia’s belly—the infant responding to her response before she knew what it was. It was fear. Outside, the rooster had given up crowing, but the bells tolled on and on. They were tolling for the dead of the plague. The fear became a clarion emotion, an imperative that held Emilia’s breath. In the fire, the skyline blackened and clarified. It was real. It was a vision, but of something real. It was a city at the end of the world.

  Then she felt what she needed to do. It was out there. She scented it like a hound.

  She stood from the bed and said to Mary, “We were better out of London. Thou art wise to be afraid. We shall fly to my cousin at Horne.”

  The room dissipated and grayed. She lost the sense of it. She was falling asleep. She couldn’t see. It went black.

  She woke in Ben’s arms—strange, cold, elated. The hotel room was there: its white, anonymous walls; the TV whose remote was on a chain so short you had to stand beside the set to use it; the notice reminding them not to waste electricity, with a cartoon of a smiling Earth. Kate was covered in sweat. The sheet was damp with it.

  Oh no, she thought happily. I have to go back. I’m no use here at all.

  7

  The next day was Sunday, the day Kate saw her parents. Ben, as they’d decided the night before, would come and meet them for the first time.

  The parents’ apartment was in Low Droit, an immigrant enclave along the East River, dominated by fifties housing projects and overlooked by the blackened stacks of the Con Ed plant that had burned in the riots of ’98. At eye level, every wall had the patchwork of politics typical of low-rent districts: flyers for political meetings, spray-painted Les Girafes graffiti—the phrase QUI VOIT, enigmatic and minatory, with the stenciled cartoon of the giraffe who sees farther with her uplofted head. All this was layered over older posters and scrawls, including a chapped mural in honor of the Mars landing, showing the three doomed astronauts planting a UN flag on a dull pink Mars. Walking from the subway, you only heard Arabic and French; all the people had a look of casual disrepair. Tides of children came and went, and the benches were occupied by clusters of women, mostly grandly fat, all smoking. Several passersby used canes or crutches; many people here had come to grief. Still, it was a peaceful scene. It had the laziness of any nice afternoon in a community that liked itself, whose people had food in the cupboard and weren’t afraid.

  Ben had woken up late, out of sorts, and needing time alone to process the decision to move in with Kate. Instead, he’d had to shower hurriedly and throw on last night’s clothes. On the subway, he and Kate hadn’t spoken at all—a terrible omen, a terrible feeling, that toothache light in the train. Now they walked down the street very slowly, dreadingly, holding hands with gloves on, while Ben kept wanting to free himself. He was thinking of excuses, ways of saying he couldn’t do this today, ways of saying they should wait to move in together. But he loved Kate. Didn’t he love Kate? Up to that moment, he had loved Kate.

  They came to the courtyard of the building where Kate’s parents lived, and found a woodwind quartet playing there, the music thinned, enfeebled, by the damp wind from the river. The musicians had been there long enough that leaves had drifted against their feet. Ben and Kate were fifteen minutes early, and they stopped in indecision and sat on a bench. Kate’s face was bright from the cold, red-tinged. She was clean and beautiful.

  And she said, carefully, gingerly, as if her long silence had been spent deliberating how to say this, “I had a dream last night.”

  In the dream, she’d been heavily pregnant and living in a plague-stricken sixteenth-century London. She knew she had a vital task to perform. She’d been sent there for that purpose. And in the fire (there was a fireplace in the room) she’d seen the apocalypse that would result if she failed, an apparition of a burnt, dead world.

  “You see, I was important in the dream,” said Kate with a humorous wistfulness. “I was the most important person in the world.”

  “I used to have dreams like that,” Ben said. “They were mostly based on comic books.”

  Kate laughed but looked a little estranged. The comic books weren’t wanted now. She took the dream more seriously than she’d let on. She looked at the woodwind quartet, which had paused. They were flexing their cold hands. She said, “Well, I know it’s not important to anyone else.”

  Then it was time to go to her parents; they now walked with their hands in their pockets. The building’s elevator was broken, and they climbed the stairs, which were bleak and grimy. The parents’ door was like the other doors: lumpy red paint, a dirty peephole, an advertising sticker from a locksmith. A murmur of voices came from behind the door, a foreign murmur that made Ben anxious. What if he didn’t like her parents? He was in the wrong mood. This was a bad idea.

  Then the doorbell, the parents themselves, and their apartment—a warmth impossibly charming, like the smell of the poppy seed cake that was baking in the oven, like the Persian rugs on the floor, whose corners had been visibly chewed by a dog. The dog in question, a pensive sheltie, regarded Ben dubiously from beneath a battered coffee table and was laughed at and cajoled to come out. (“Don’t be foolish,” Kate’s mother, Ágota, told the dog. “You are really very brave.”) The dog was named Dog-knees, a pun on Diogenes the Cynic—cynic meaning “doglike” in ancient Greek. She’d been named by Kate’s little brother, who’d just moved away; he was a freshman at Penn State. “It was so very clever when he was twelve,” said Ágota, “and now we are saddled with this terrible joke.” Kate crouched down to stroke the dog’s ears, smiling up at Ben, who loved the dog and the parents and her, and felt complicatedly relieved.

  Kate’s father, Salman, was extravagantly Persian somehow, although his accent was broad Bostonian and he wore a Red Sox sweatshirt. He gesticulated and was gorgeously physical; Kate was his female self. They had the same childlike seriousness, an ease in their bodies that was insistently about their bodies, a sexiness. While Salman talked and talked, Ágota kept wryly catching Ben’s eye and once said, “I hope this is not all too ridiculous.” She was delicate and mouse-like, pale, with salt-and-pepper hair and tiny hands poised in a manner that suggested gloves. She spoke with a slow Hungarian accent that seemed drenched in Eastern European folklore, pelagic and wise and good.

  Kate’s parents took to Ben immediately. While Kate set
the table, they made him recite one of his poems, then called it remarkable, intense, exquisite. Ágota asked Ben about his PhD and seemed very interested in the issues arising in CO2 sequestration in deep saline aquifers (his dissertation topic), even though it wasn’t interesting; that was the reason it was taking so long to write up. Then Salman raved exuberantly about a Fra Angelico exhibition at the Met that was so amazing it had made him believe in God—the paintings were holy, Salman felt this, they had the unmistakable quality of truthful statements, statements about an experience of God—until Kate laughed and said, “But you don’t believe in God, Dad,” and Salman said without breaking stride, “Well, of course I don’t,” and they all laughed. Everything was good, maybe better than good. Ben felt he understood for the first time what it would be like to have a happy family.

  Meanwhile, the poppy seed cake appeared. There was a pause to take first bites, to react, to give it appreciative room. Then Kate said, with an air of great moment, as if she’d convened them all here for this purpose, “I had a dream last night.”

  She told the dream again, adding details—she was pregnant by the Lord Chamberlain in the dream, Lord Hunsdon. She was his mistress. She had some different husband, though, a musician who played at court. He played the recorder, but was that really an instrument they played back then?

  “In the dream, I decided to leave London with my servants. I had a hunch that was what I needed to do. It sounds really stupid now that I say it. If I was there to do something important, shouldn’t I have tried to end the plague? But you’d have to manufacture antibiotics on a massive scale, so I can’t see how you’d actually do it.”

  “Very interesting,” said Ágota, in the tone of a person waiting to change the subject, and Salman got up and went into the kitchen to get more coffee. There was a change in the mood, a stiffness. Kate fell silent. She was staring into the middle distance, looking isolated and thwarted.