Chapter 40: Pain will go
Serena placed The Firebird on the phonograph. The delicate
footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through infinite distance,
each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth, each
note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails
thrashing in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the
multiple debris of the stained glass fountains of desire.
She lifted the needle, cut the music harshly in mid-air. “Why? Why?
Why?” cried Donald, as if wounded.
Serena had silenced the firebirds of desire, and now she extended
her arms like widely extended wings, wings no longer orange, and
Donald gave himself to their protective embrace. The Serena he
embraced was the one he needed, the dispenser of food, of fulfilled
promises, of mendings and knitting, comforts and solaces, of
blankets and reassurances, of heaters, medicines, potions and
scaffolds.
“You’re the firebird, Serena, and that was why, until you came, all
my cages were empty. It was you I wanted to capture.” Then with a
soft, a defeated tenderness he lowered his eyelashes and added: “I
know I have no way to keep you here, nothing to hold you here…”
Her breasts were no longer tipped with fire, they were the breasts
of the mother, from which flowed nourishment. She deserted her
other loves to fulfill Donald’s needs. She felt: “I am a woman, I am
warm, tender and nourishing. I am fecund and I am good.”
Such serenity came with this state of being woman the mother! The
humble, the menial task-performing mother as she had known her in
her own childhood.
When she found chaotic,eyes.
He turned his powerful flashlight upon a bush in his garden and said:
“Look at this!”
In the night she saw flowers of velvet with black hearts and gold
eyes.
“What kind of a flower is that?” she asked, to please him.
“Roses of Sharon,” he said reverently and with the purest of Irish
accents. “They only grow in Ireland and on Long Island.”
Serena’s rebellion was subsiding. She felt a tenderness for the roses
of Sharon, for the policeman’s protectiveness, for his effort to find a
substitute for tropical flowers, a little beauty in the present night.
“I’ll sleep now,” she said. “You can drop me off at the Penny
Cottage.”
“Oh no,” he said, sitting at the wheel. “We’ll drive around by the
sea until you’re so sleepy you can’t bear it anymore. You can’t
sleep, you know, until you find something to be grateful for, you can
never sleep when you’re angry.”
She could not hear very distinctly his long and rambling stories
about his life as a bodyguard, except when he said: “There’s two of
you giving me trouble with homesickness today. The other was a
young fellow in the English Air Corps. Aviator all through the war,
seventeen when he volunteered. He’s grounded now, and he can’t
take it. He’s restless and keeps speeding and breaking traffic laws.
The red lights drive him crazy. When I saw what it was, I stopped
giving him tickets. He’s used to airplanes. Being grounded is tough.
I know how he feels.”
She felt the mists of sleep rising from the ground, bearing the
perfume of roses of Sharon; in the sky shone the eyes of the
grounded aviator not yet accustomed to small scales, to shrunken
spaces. There were other human beings attempting vast flights, with
a kind policeman as tall as the crusaders watching over them with a
glass of water and two aspirins; she could sleep now, she could
sleep, she could find her bed with his flashlight shining on the
keyhole, his car so smoothly so gently rolling away, his white hair
saying sleep…
Serena in the telephone booth. Daniel had just said that he was unable
to come that day. Serena felt like sliding down on the floor and
sobbing out the loneliness. She wanted to return to New York but
he begged her to wait.
There were places which were like ancient tombs in which a day
was a century of non-existence. He had said: “Surely you can wait
another day. I’ll be there tomorrow. Don’t be unreasonable. “
She could not explain that perfect lawns, costly churches, new
cement and fresh paint can make a vast tomb without stone gods to
admire, without jewels, or urns full of food for the dead, without
hieroglyphs to decipher.Telephone wires only carried literal messages, never the
subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they
delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and
deaths, but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb,
and one more day in it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish
policemen, and roses of Sharon were too gentle a cure for
suffocation.
Grounded. Just before she slid down to the floor, the bottom of the
telephone cabin, the bottom of her loneliness, she saw the grounded
aviator waiting to use the telephone. When she came out of the
booth he looked distressed again as he seemed to be by everything
that happened in time of peace. But he smiled when he recognized
her, saying: “You told me the way to the beach.”
“You found it? You liked it?”
“A little flat for my taste. I like rocks and palm trees. Got used to
them in India, during the war.”