Margaret and I, page 13
Margaret thought of the garden where Paul had taken her, the hallucination of the garden, she corrected herself hurriedly. “What do you think of what he was doing?” she asked when the silence seemed to be growing too personal somehow.
“I don’t know. Yesterday I might have said I thought he was just another crank, but today … There are hundreds of sects, organizations, study groups, you name it, all searching for this sort of thing. Millions of people have experienced something that has led them to believe that there is a superconsciousness, or heaven, or God-experience, or oceanic feeling, or something, that isn’t limited by the space-time laws that we recognize in this reality field that we live in. Every religion, every folklore touches on it sooner or later. It gets stomped to the ground every century—mechanistic man, existential man, electrochemical man—but it never stays down. It’s been twisted to fit creeds—the predestination of Calvin and Luther, salvation by good works and prayer, the cyclic theories of limbo until the next cycle begins, reincarnation, with the ultimate aim of unification with the unknowable. …” He smiled suddenly. “I’m not going to preach to you, Meg. I don’t know what I believe yet. Maybe I never will know. I don’t believe that man rises from nowhere only to fall back into nowhere after his few years are finished, but where he goes next, I don’t know. If he can get there before death, I don’t know.”
‘This … this feeling, the mystical experience. Have you had it?” Her hands became very quiet, no longer playing with the pages of the notebook she still held.
“Until yesterday I think I would have said I wasn’t certain. Now … yes. I know what they mean.”
Margaret got up quickly and went to the window. “The sky’s on fire. What a strange light.” Without turning around she asked, “Why do I feel that I know you? Not just about you. Actually know you. We’ve never met?” She hadn’t meant to ask. She knew the answer.
“I know what you mean. And no, we haven’t met before.”
She kept her face toward the window. Dawn was hurrying now, streamers of fire stretching from north to south as far as she could see. “Everything’s strange out here. Everything’s turned topsy-turvy on me. Television. Probably I’ve seen you on television. Or an article about you.”
He didn’t reply, and after a moment she turned toward him. “After all,” she said rapidly, “you are famous. Many people who meet you probably feel as if they’d known you before.”
“Infamous maybe. And you, have you been on television? Or on the cover of Newsweek?”
She smiled at the idea. “Of course not.”
He continued to regard her steadily. “When you came in here this morning, you weren’t surprised to find me already up, were you?” She shook her head. “And as soon as you walked through that doorway, I realized that I had got two cups out, that one of them was ready for you. I wasn’t thinking consciously about it, but there it was.”
“You were just being polite.”
“And you probably noticed that I wasn’t sleeping on the couch as you went by the living room. Our actions just happened to mesh.”
He was laughing at her, although no trace showed on his face. “Coincidence,” she said, hearing the stiffness in her voice too late.
“Or preview?”
She ignored that as if she hadn’t even heard it. She picked up the notebook and when she spoke again, she forced a cooler tone, a more distant and formal hostess voice. “Dr. Bok believes there is a magic place where there is no time as we know it.”
“Meg, wait a minute.” John reached out and closed his hand over hers on the notebook. “Something else Paul Tyson said once in one of his lectures. I didn’t understand it then. He said that development continues long after physical growth stops. Emotional, mental, psychic development goes on and on, but you can deny it and stop along the way. He said it can be frightening sometimes, that it can threaten your entire life, the lives of others. Then you have to choose, quite deliberately.”
“You can’t choose anything unless you know what the choices are,” she said almost hysterically. Not now, she was thinking over and over. Not now. She couldn’t think of anything now. Abruptly he released her hand and she sat down. In a rush she said, “Dr. Bok thinks that magic place can be reached. He thinks he can get to it.”
“Bok believes that Paul Tyson discovered the way. He’s very excited by this work. What does he want to use it for? Do you know?”
“Don’t you?” John shook his head as if questions were framing themselves that he refused to ask. “I don’t know that either. To start a school, to become a latter-day saint who can teach the way, to write a book? Any of those things, I suppose.” He stood up then and went to the door looking out. “I wish we didn’t have to leave this morning. But I did promise to get them back by noon. I have to go down and see how the boat looks. Do you want to come too?”
They walked without speaking down to the beach. The boat was floating free of the rocks, now restrained only by the anchor. John stared at it in disbelief. It was an old sailboat with an auxiliary engine, painted blue, with orange trim and shining brass fittings. Margaret read the name painted on the side: La Belle Dame Sans Merci. She looked again at John Llewellyn, startled. But he was preoccupied with the problem of reaching the boat, of getting the kids aboard again. He climbed onto the rocks and studied it, then nodded and jumped down again.
“Okay, let’s go get the lazyheads up and at it. Clive and Mike can swim out to it from the rocks and lower a boat for the girls.” He looked at Margaret apologetically again, “I am sorry we have to leave now. I’d like to stay and talk with you. I want to come back. If the weather holds, would you like to sail on Saturday?”
“Love it,” she said.
“Good. I’ll come back and anchor and pick you up by neon. Okay?”
The kids were hungry and they ran out of eggs and bacon, and finished the rest of the ham and all the bread and butter. Clive drank a full quart of milk by himself. The girls vanished while the boys went down with John to look over the boat, and when they were all ready to leave, Margaret saw that the girls had cleaned the house. The beds were made, the blankets put away neatly, the bathroom cleaned. She went with them to the beach and stood on the rocks watching as they all got aboard and began to run up the sails, well cleared of the rocks now, with the motor making a steady throbbing sound.
Then there were hands waving and a shout of farewell, and the sails filled and the boat began to move away; Margaret stood on the rocks until it was a speck on the water, and then walked slowly back to the house, feeling very lonely. It was only fifteen after nine when she got back to the kitchen. What could she do all day? She didn’t want to see Morris Stein or Bok, and she couldn’t bear the thought of remaining inside. She decided to drive to the end of the island, have lunch somewhere along the way, possibly shop a little, for groceries at any rate. As she left the driveway making the turn to the road, she saw Morris Stein appear outside the garage apartment door and stand watching her. He waved for her to stop, or come back, or something and she pretended that she didn’t see him. Her heart was pounding, however, and her hands tightened on the steering wheel until she was beyond his line of sight. Why did he affect her like that, she thought angrily. I relaxed a little then; I had got her out of the house, away from Morris Stein for the day, and I needed time to think about him and how to get out from under him. I knew that as soon as he and Margaret were alone again I would be vulnerable, and now I knew too much that I didn’t want to tell him. Yet, I would tell him, I suspected. I had no way to defend myself from him. This was the first time that I had been threatened by an outside person in my entire life, and I had to find a way to counter his soothing voice and keep myself intact. What frightened me was the fact that Margaret—I had been able to reach out to John and take him into the void. And that John remembered it. He had said he’d dreamed, but I was certain he remembered and that was why he wanted to come back to talk to Margaret
Margaret had brought three of the notebooks with her, and she planned to find a quiet beach somewhere, or a deserted restaurant where she would be allowed to sit over coffee and puzzle through them. I knew that if I could get her in the same frame of mind that Morris Stein had brought about, I could make her pore over every page for me, and I would have the time to decipher them even if she couldn’t. She turned east, avoiding Baiting Hollow, and then drove steadily, not fast, noticing the scenery, feeling the air on her face. I saw Bok’s car almost as soon as he made the turn to the highway, but Margaret didn’t notice it I couldn’t see who was driving, but I suspected Morris Stein had been sent after her. Margaret’s thoughts had turned to Bennett and Greeley by then, and she was wondering if Bennett would really try to get Greeley to forget that he wanted her to go on the campaign trail with them. She knew that she would not go, regardless of his threats, but how seriously were those threats to be taken? Could he do anything to her father, a high school principal? She didn’t think so. It had shaken her badly, having the threat made so openly, so blatantly, and there had been no time to think, but now, she was certain that she could safely ignore him and whatever noises he made.
Margaret began to hum. The farther she got from the house, she was thinking, the clearer and simpler things were becoming for her. Where the tangles had seemed impenetrable, now they were falling apart by themselves. If she left Bennett, what then? Work again? Probably. And eventually she probably would marry someone else and have children and be busy with P.T.A. and clubs and committees and … She stopped humming. It didn’t have to be like that, she told herself. She would shape her own future, make her life have meaning even if the universe had none.
She was scowling by then and the whole problem of what to do seemed less soluble. She remembered the wholeness she had experienced with Paul in her hallucination and she knew that that was what John Llewellyn had talked about when he said millions experienced something that made them believe in that other dimension. Everything paled in comparison to that one brief illusory experience.
If she could find a way to return to that… Her hand fell on the notebooks beside her and she began to search for a place to stop.
She had no memory of the several times when it had not been pleasant, when violence and pain had been all too real in the world of illusion. I circled and saw that Morris Stein and Margaret were together talking quietly, then not so quietly. I saw the notebooks open on her knees and read those pages I could see. That might be the way, I decided, and looked for other times when she had finally opened them. Bit by bit I was getting them, a page here, several pages later on; Morris was closing the gap between the two cars, and I had to abandon the notes and watch Margaret. I repeatedly made her notice the rearview mirror and she saw the car coming up without recognition. I gave her a glimpse of the same car parked beside her own on the driveway, and then she realized that she was being followed.
I let her feel my alarm, but it turned her the wrong way. She reacted against k, and instead of running, she decided to stop at the first restaurant she saw and dare him to make a nuisance of himself in a public place. That wasn’t the way, I tried to tell her. With four softly spoken words he would have her doing whatever he wanted her to do. I tried to take over and have her outrun him, and even as I did, I knew that there was no place really to run. The road simply ended at the end of the island. She could go so far, and eventually she would have to stop, back up, or make a circle and turn around to go back. There was more ambivalence in Margaret in the next few minutes than she normally would have felt in years. She wanted desperately to be left alone for the day, to think, to read the notebooks, to make decisions. She wanted almost equally desperately to talk to Morris Stein, to tell him about the brief hallucination she had suffered, to talk to him about Paul Tyson and his work. I wanted to talk to him, I knew, and fought that knowledge and the fact, but her foot touched the brake when she saw the sign ahead: Plum on the Sound—Pine Food.
Morris was coming in fast now. He wanted to catch up with her before she got inside. I urged her to hurry, made her more afraid, and she almost ran to the door. The restaurant was an old Tudor-design building, with the wood darkened to near black. Inside it was dark and cool, a house converted to a restaurant, very pleasant with chandeliers that were darkened now, but massive and beautiful. There was a long bar, unoccupied, and beyond the arched door, the dining room with three or four tables being used. A man materialized from the dark recess behind the bar.
“One?” he said
Margaret nodded, glancing toward the door. It was heavy and no sound came through it from the parking lot in front. She followed the man to a table by a window overlooking the sound. He placed a menu before her and withdrew.
One of the tables had three men: lawyers or businessmen. A couple, middle-aged, not speaking at all, sat at the second table, and the third one had two middle-aged women who paid no attention to Margaret after her arrival, but kept their heads close together talking avidly. Margaret lighted a cigarette and waited. When she heard the door she didn’t look up. I heard Morris enter, knew that he stood speaking a moment with the waiter, or whoever he was, and then crossed the floor to Margaret’s table.
“Hello, Josie,” he said and pulled out a chair.
“Mr. Stein, why did you follow me here? What do you want?”
“Josie, that’s not fair. I often come here for lunch. I saw you, it’s true, but I thought that you might want to talk to me. Don’t you?”
“No,” she said tightly.
He laughed and reached across the table to take her hand. “That’s not true, is it? You want very much to talk to me. You want to tell me about Paul Tyson and his experiments, don’t you?”
I nodded, and Margaret’s hand trembled in his. Leave, I told her. Get up and go. Leave your gloves on the table, he’ll think you’re coming back. Excuse yourself and go. Now. She reached for her purse and started to rise. His hand holding hers tightened and very quietly he said, “You are very tired, my dear. That’s right, sit down, relax. Just sit up normally. But relax. Don’t be afraid. In a moment I’m going to tell you to wake up and walk with me to the lounge on the other side of the bar. You’ll want to go there with me so we can have a quiet drink and talk a little bit. You won’t be afraid at all.”
The lounge was very dark, with heavy brown drapes drawn at the windows, and massive green and dark red overstuffed furniture. Margaret sank down into one of the chairs and Morris drew a second one close to hers. He ordered drinks for them both, gin and tonic. The bartender could see them from his place in the bar section of the restaurant, and he looked in now and then and saw only the woman sitting quietly in the deep chair, and the man leaning toward her slightly, sipping his drink, talking peacefully.
Margaret floated and relaxed and I answered questions now and then, not when they were addressed to Josie, but general questions about how I felt, if I was afraid, and things like that. Morris Stein seemed perplexed by something, I noticed, when I noticed him at all, which wasn’t often. He said, “Do you remember our lovemaking?”
“Yes.”
“You had been very lonesome, hadn’t you? You hadn’t had it like that for a long time, had you?”
“No.”
“You loved Paul Tyson very much, didn’t you?”
I was shaken by the question, and I felt myself become more alert, less willing, eager even, to please him. He said, “Relax, relax. That’s right.” For several minutes he was silent, then he said, “We are going to leave here. I’m going to wake you up and you will eat the sandwich I ordered for you, drink the coffee. You will wake up feeling very good, very relaxed and good. You won’t be afraid of me, or try to avoid me. You will drive back to the cottage when we leave here and as soon as you walk inside the house, you will start to remember making love with me. You will remember every detail of it, every little bit of it, and you will find yourself becoming very excited. It will excite you to remember it. You won’t want to avoid me…” He went on several minutes and then woke her up.
Chapter 12
Margaret rationalized returning to the house so early: she had to have reference books nearby if she was going to make any sense out of Paul’s notebooks; she was very tired from being up late and rising at dawn; there was no place where she could count on being left alone anyway, so she might as well be inside the house….
I was desperately searching through everything I’d ever read or heard about hypnotism, for a way to escape Morris Stein. I couldn’t find any way to avoid him. I didn’t understand how he had done it, why it had worked, but it had, and as soon as he spoke, I was exposed again. It was as if Margaret were window dressing only, to be got out of the way so that he might get directly at me, and she moved aside obligingly with no memory of having moved at all. He had given her the verbal concepts of acceptance, of friendliness, of desire for him, but he couldn’t control the deeper unnamed precepts that also were roused. She wanted to talk to him, confide in him, and she was afraid of him at the same time. She felt an unspecified sexual fascination that she couldn’t explain, and, yet the thought of deliberately copulating with him was distasteful to her. What she really wanted was to walk hand in hand with him. Innocently exciting, stimulating, but free of obligation, not involved. Still, she drove toward the house unaware that he was the only reason for her early return.
