Island Page 2

  I sat forward, to encourage him, despite the smug smile that had alighted on his face. He reached to his right and pulled down a book from the shelf there. He thumbed through it until he had come to a page of diagrams. I pulled my chair in closer.

  “Now, the caterpillar spends all its time feeding. That’s its business. That’s what it does. Then, after molting, shedding its skin several times, it becomes a chrysalis, or pupa. This is the resting stage of its life. What emerges from the pupa is not yet a butterfly. See here? That’s an imago. See it? The pupa splits open and the imago crawls out. It will hang on a twig or cling to a leaf until it becomes a butterfly.”

  “And how does it do that?” I asked.

  “It beats its wings,” he said looking up at me, emphasizing, in the word “beats,” the wonder of it all. “And as it beats its wings, blood is rapidly injected into them and into its organs. The body, now robbed of its liquid contents, shortens up. See here? That’s its abdomen. The chitinous rings—these here, they compose its external structure—they set and harden. And meanwhile, the wings expand. And voilà! This creature, this insect who has spent its life groveling on the earth, eating, shedding, creeping, crawling, is now ready to soar. That, my friend, is metamorphosis. That you won’t find in your Kafka.”

  He closed the book and flashed his smile. I smiled back at him, waiting.

  “Courtship often involves elaborate dances.” His eyebrows rose and fell. “It’s something to see.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” He looked at his watch. “I have a class,” he lamented, rising. I looked at mine. I had one too. “I have some slides at home,” he said. “You ought to drop over and see them sometime.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  He squinted down at me. Then the inevitable smile came again. “Bartlett,” he said, slapping me on the back with his small, fat hand. “I had no idea you were such a naturalist.” I stood up to go, but something occurred to him and he put his hand out. “You’re not planning on collecting them, are you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Butterflies, Barlett.”

  “Oh, no. No, no.”

  “Good,” he said. “Collect stamps, if you must. Or women. But I advise you to leave butterflies alone. Many species are already extinct, and many more are endangered.”

  “Pesticides?” I offered.

  “Yes,” he said. “Butterflies are important plant pollinators, you know. They are also useful as indicators of the ecological quality of the environment. We need them. But observe them all you like, Bartlett. Get yourself some nectar-producing plants. They’ll come around. Then you can watch them all you like, but—”

  “Don’t collect them. Got ya,” I interrupted.

  “Come by tonight,” he said as we went out into the hall to part ways. “Marge is going to an Imposter Syndrome seminar. We can spend as much time as we like going over my slides. Hmph! Never thought of you as a naturalist.”

  Among Stalk’s slides, which I viewed not only that night but also on one other blissful occasion, I found the creature which most resembled the one on Carole’s neck, or at least my recollection of it. Stalk called it a Blue Copper, not nearly a splendid enough name to denote its beauty. It’s wings, softly triangular things, were an iridescent silvery blue on the outside, and a rich, velvety white underneath. The white underside, in addition to displaying a sash of small black circles, was edged with a fine line of black which faded to gray and then disappeared altogether as it went ’round. The blue side was likewise bordered with black, but here the line enclosed the wing entirely, faintly at either side and growing bolder at the center. There were also thin black veins on the blue side, setting off the color between them like solder does the glass in a stained-glass window. Beyond the border, the wings were tipped with fine silver projections, like angel’s lashes. Its antennae were delicately ringed in black and white. They were long and thin in form, terminating in a gradually enlarged, spindle-shaped club. As I studied the projection of the Blue Copper on the wall, my view of it hindered only slightly by the persistent shadow of the lamp, and the occasional one of Stalk’s pudgy finger, I imagined the fair creature alighting on my hand, nearly weightless, the mellifluous music of its wings taking flight, its colors interchanging in the sunlight, the moonlight, the twilight—like grace itself.

  The evening after my second visit with Stalk, I sat at home at my desk and attempted to write a poem that would embrace the emotion I had felt at the sight of the Blue Copper and the woman it represented. As I moved my pen across the paper, I imagined Carole reading the words it expelled. But the words, I noted after I had written several lines of them, were mere words, and had nothing in common with the vision I had had at their onset. I trashed my first effort and began another, but with the same result. I started a third, but that effort too became impossible because by then I had begun to pity myself, having remembered suddenly, and vividly, the young man whose verses had come so easily, and how certain he had been that his fame would one day be spread far and wide. In the midst of my fourth effort, I found my self-pity crawling onto the paper before me, mingling with the flat, uninspired declaration of my love, surpassing it in effectiveness and lyric quality, and I gave up the poem altogether.

  To punish myself for my failure, I went through several books searching for poems about butterflies. I found many, but one, by Hugo, called “Flower to Butterfly,” was especially apt. It echoed my vision precisely. The flower, who is the narrator in the poem, laments that his fate is to sit and watch the butterfly’s flight. But he loves the butterfly even as he envies her, and he selfishly suggests they dwell together, telling her that although in doing so she would have to abandon her flying, he would make it worth her while by protecting her always from the gloomy dark. I spent a good hour grieving over the fact that I had not written it, and when I was done, I spent another copying an English translation of it onto a piece of onionskin paper with a #1 rapidograph. My penmanship, unlike my poetic skill, is still quite good, and the effect of Hugo’s poem in my hand on the onionskin was aesthetically blissful. I considered giving credit to its author and translator somewhere on the page but decided against it, for it was by now growing late, and I had succeeded in convincing some small, frail part of my mind that, in fact, I had written the poem. And then, because the moonlight was rapidly filling the room, softening its furnishings and the integrity of its sole inhabitant, I folded the onionskin and put it into an envelope. I addressed the envelope to Miss Glass, care of La Vida’s, etc. Then I put the envelope into a drawer and went to bed.

  Thus the summer passed. And one Friday, just before the fall semester was about the begin, Carole did wait on me, and I made another important discovery. As she was setting down my soup bowl, slowly, because it was overfull, I noted on the back side of her pearly white hand, a faint line of discoloration, a scar. It ran up from her wrist to her middle knuckle, curved ’round, and came back down again at an angle. As the hand withdrew, I stared down steadily into my soup bowl, hoping the pea-greenness of its contents would curb the expression of exultation I felt rising up within me. The woman was not only a fair, fragile creature of the day, flitting from table to table and sprinkling at each the pollen of her good-naturedness! She was also a woman who understands that love and pain are cohabitants on the same plateau. And long ago, so long ago that only eyes as skilled as mine might have detected it, some Ronald or Richard or Robert had had the good fortune to have his initial fused with her flesh!

  If her neck and hand were thus marked by the impulse and passion of her past, I asked myself, might not other areas of her body be likewise imprinted? Would not one good inspection of it, like my inspection of Stalk’s diagrams, enable me to visualize her in childhood, puberty, the teen years, and onward? From caterpillar to pupa to imago to butterfly? Would not her very soul be available for my viewing pleasure?

  I was overcome with joy, and I named my joy “desire,” but I had no idea how I would go about f
urthering our relationship. I still did not know her first name! And though I assumed she was not married, for she wore no wedding band, I had no way of knowing if she was otherwise unattached. But as the fall semester progressed, and Forneau, now back from France, and I resumed our Friday lunches together, I began to fancy that she was aware of my love and my special attention to the vicinity of her neck, for on the twenty-sixth of September, she came to work without her scarf—and she continued to go about with her nape bared on all subsequent Fridays. Was she teasing me, I wondered during the weeks that followed, or did she wish to show me that my love was not unrequited? Or perhaps it was not only on Fridays and for my sake that she had given up her dark adornments, but on all seven days of the week and for another reason altogether. I could not sleep at night for the presence of these questions. They nagged me when I lectured; they appeared before my eyes when I read; they both raised my regrets and relieved them.

  When the fall semester was nearing completion and I could stand it no longer, I went to find Masterson in the computer room and offered to buy him lunch at La Vida’s. This was not on a Friday but on a Tuesday, and I had chosen Masterson rather than Forneau so as not to arouse Forneau’s suspicions. My motives were mixed: Masterson was a hunting enthusiast, and since the deer season had just ended, I knew he would be good company. Furthermore, several months earlier I had won a good deal of money from him in a poker game and I wished to express my regret through my fellowship. But the real reason I wanted to go to La Vida’s on a Tuesday, of course, was to see if Carole would be with or without a scarf. The idea of breaking the Firday ritual alarmed me, but I saw it was the price I would have to pay to satisfy the curiosity whose slave I had become. Logic had abandoned me—and in the grayness of the situation, I saw only black and white: If she wore a scarf, I would know that she loved me. If not, all hope was lost.

  We sat in the booth in the back, and our waitress—not Carole—took our order. As always, Masterson began the conversation by asking me if I had gotten around to buying a word processor yet for my work, by which he meant not the scholarly articles the department chair urges the rest of us to write, but the poetry I once wrote—and still pretend to write—back in the days when the Muses and I were on better terms. Although we both knew I did not have, and would probably never have, a word processor, we had tacitly agreed long ago that this inquiry would be sufficient to get us off the ground, for Masterson was as wretched at small talk as I. The subject of word processors enabled me to begin a discourse on my general distaste for modern technology, which we likewise knew was not altogether true, and, if we were lucky, this would move us into more agreeable regions.

  It did not take long before we had gotten around to the very agreeable topic of hunting, but although I had been looking forward to it, for I do my own hunting each year vicariously through him, I found, as our discussion proceeded, that I was in a tumultuous emotional state. All at once, logic, who had for so long evaded me, made a conspicuous homecoming, and it occurred to me that Carole, whom I had not seen yet, might take my Tuesday presence to mean that I was spying on her! Or worse, she might not give my Tuesday presence a second thought! Oh, yes, it was easy enough to imagine that she was aware of my passion and secretly harbored her own on a Friday, that marvelous, anticipatory day of the week. But this was not Friday! It was not even Thursday! And the possibility that I was nothing to her, nothing at all, that with so many people coming and going so many days of the week, she might not have even recalled that we had once exchanged a smile, a laugh, and a few words that had nothing to do with food, was not at all remote. After all, what did she know of me but my face? And what was my face but a fleshy, despairing-looking thing which more and more resembled in the afternoons and evenings the hideous version I see of it in the early-morning mirror? Or worse yet, Tuesday might be her day off! And while I was sitting here, precariously suspended between fancy and reality, between the what-if’s—which are as loud and unruly as crows when they get together—and the sane, steady discourse of my friend, she, on an afternoon as cold as this, might just be rising from her bed, slipping into a robe, and heading for the coffeepot! This thought was particularly disturbing, for although I had well imagined her sordid past, I had never imagined a present for her outside of La Vida’s, which is to say outside my own perception of it. I spread my fingers and attached them to my face. Beyond my madness I heard Masterson saying, “The secret, my friend, lies in never underestimating the prey whose environment you are trespassing.”

  I released my grip on my face and was about to answer, or at least I had opened my mouth with the hope that a response would follow, when all at once I saw Carole coming out of the kitchen, wearing, to my inexpressible delight, one of her dark scarves around her neck. I followed her with my eyes as she brought a hamburger platter over to an old woman sitting at a table near the door. The woman said something to Carole which Carole apparently did not hear. Carole lowered her head very close to the woman’s mouth, so that it was not much above the hamburger, and listened while the woman repeated herself. Then Carole nodded and went dashing off to the kitchen. “But,” I said, turning to Masterson, whose face showed signs of concern for my well-being, “the good hunter will not let his prey know he has trespassed into her environment until the crucial moment is at hand.” And mumbling an inelegant apology, to which Masterson made no response, I fled.

  I have indicated that I have always lived my life from the outside in, but now I knew what it was like to be beside oneself I seemed to be watching from a distance on Tuesday night as the tall, bald man with the portly paunch ran through the first snow of the season to the mailbox carrying the envelope that contained Hugo’s poem. I listened like an eavesdropper on Wednesday and Thursday while he decided how he would get to La Vida’s on Friday without his friend Forneau and without alienating him as he assumed he had Masterson. The crucial moment, he believed, was indeed at hand, and though he knew that I knew it might be the beginning of the end, he was defenseless in the face of its progression.

  On Friday morning I watched Donald Bartlett as he went to Forneau’s office well before the lunch hour and told him that he would be meeting a student that day at La Vida’s, and so, not only did he not require Forneau’s company, but he preferred Forneau resist the temptation to go on his own as well. To Forneau’s inevitable ‘Pourquoi?’ he responded that the student in question was having grave psychological problems which she wished to discuss with him, Bartlett, and if these problems were more than he could handle, and he had need to confer with his friend on her account, it would be imperative, on ethical grounds, that Forneau did not know who she was. Ethical imperatives, Donald Bartlett knew, are always useful in cases such as this. Forneau, though obviously curious, would have no more gone to La Vida’s than Donald Bartlett would have stayed away.

  Once at La Vida’s, he wasted no time. He stood by a stool at the bar near the entrance until he saw her come out from the kitchen, heading for a table which had just been vacated. He took a deep breath and followed her toward it, and while she was clearing it, he stood just behind her and waited patiently for her to turn around. Then he waited an additional moment for her shock at his sudden appearance to subside. And then, staring at the engraved flower on her left earring because he could not bring himself to look directly into her eyes, he said the words which I had heard him rehearsing in our office between classes for the last three days and most of the night before in our bed. “Miss Glass,” he said, “I love you.”

  He slid his gaze from her ear to her mouth in time to see her bottom lip drop open and a “ha” tumble out. She put her tray of dirty plates back down on the table. On one of them, Donald Bartlett noted, someone had put out a cigarette by submerging it into his unwanted mashed potatoes. The protruding filter was surrounded by ash, and it made him think of a smokestack atop a high white mountain. The courage he gathered at this sight enabled him to lift his gaze to Carole’s. There he saw, as on the occasion of their first meeting
, the ochre streaks flashing to the rhythm of her perplexity, but now with an intensity which he had not seen before. As he watched, her features seemed to harden, and he feared for a moment that she would slap him, especially when he saw her hand ascending from her side. But she merely placed the back of it to her mouth and emitted a little cough of a laugh against it. The flames in her eyes, meanwhile, dimmed to a twinkle, and, for a moment, she smiled pleasantly from behind her hand. Then, when she saw that his expression had not changed—an expression which he and I knew was the sort a dog wears when his master is slow in filling his bowl—she dropped both her hand and her mirth and returned to her perplexed state. Madman! I cried. Fool! Madman! But it was too late. He was indifferent to my exclamations and continued to offer her the same hungry-dog expression.

  Hours passed—or so it seemed. Then she laughed again, a solitary burst, soft and timorous. And then, all at once, she smiled shrewdly, squinting her eyes the way children do when they know they are being teased. “Did you happen to send me a poem?” she asked.

  Donald Bartlett nodded.

  “It was lovely,” she declared. “Did you write it yourself?”

  Again, he nodded.

  “No one every wrote me a poem before,” she said softly. Then, looking suddenly from side to side, as though she had just remembered where she was and what she had been doing, she whispered, “I’ve got to go.”

  Still Donald Bartlett said nothing.

  “Well,” she said, lifting the tray of dirty dishes. She shrugged her shoulders and began moving away, but backwards, so that she was still facing him. “Maybe we can talk later.”

  He, of course, nodded in response.

  “I get off at four,” she said, and then she turned around and hurried toward the kitchen.

  Donald Bartlett remained where he was until he was certain that his blood had resumed its flow.