The Red Tree

Wasn’t he finally devoured for his sins by vengeful Mediterranean urchins, while poor Catherine watched on?”

“That’s not how it ever seemed to me,” I said. “To me, it always seemed that Sebastian merely consummated his desires. He’d looked upon the face of god, when he and Violet took their cruise to the Galapagos Islands—”

“The part of the play with the predatory birds and the baby sea turtles,” Constance said, and I nodded.

“Sebastian was only seeking after release, having seen too much, and that day the boys at Cabeza de Lobowere only providing that release.”

“It means ‘head of the wolf,’ ” she said. “Cabeza de Lobo,”and I told her that I already knew that.

“Well, you’re a smart cookie. Not everyone would,” she replied, and then added, “But yes, I think it’s exactly that sort of a feast.”

“They never proved that Olney was a ca

This conversation, there was so much of it. It went on and on while the air conditioner wheezed and choked and sputtered. And at some point I realized that, while I was still wearing my old wool coat, Constance was completely naked. I hoped she would invite me into her bed again. She sat there like some heathen idol, some Venus made not of marble but living, breathing tissue. Her legs were open, revealing the wet portal of her sex, and she didn’t seem to mind that I stared, but, like Amanda, she warned that I could go blind, if I looked too long or too closely.

“I thought that only worked with masturbation and the sun,” I protested.

“Moonlight is merely reflected sunshine,” she said, “and every star is another sun.” Then, as I watched, her skin changed, or I noticed for the first time that it had been meticulously painted with a pattern of overlapping oak leaves. And, before my eyes, the painted leaves turned from summer greens to rich shades of red and brown. And they began to fall, slipping off her body and settling onto the mattress all around her. I remembered the kanji tattooed above her buttocks:

and for a while, I could only watch the spectacle of the leaves drifting down from Constance’s shoulders and breasts and face. It was too beautiful to turn away from, and like Harvey’s Quercus rubra,somehow too sublime, too terrible. I realized that the air in the attic had lost all its characteristic odors — turpentine, oils and acrylics, linseed oil, gesso, stale cigarette smoke. Now there were only the faintly spicy smells of autumn.

“Did you do that all by yourself?” I asked, meaning the elaborate painting on her skin.

“Oh, hardly,” she laughed. “Too many spots I could never reach on my own. I had help. But, I don’t think you’re paying very close attention.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” I said.

“Maybe, Sarah, it happens that you can’t see the forest for the trees.” And we both laughed then, because it was such a corny thing for her to have said, even in the interminable, rambling dream of mine.

“All two billion?” I asked.

“At least,” she said. The leaves were still falling from her painted body, and I marveled that she could shed so many and not be diminished. I thought how each one must be like a dead skin cell, sloughed off to make room for its successor.

And then Constance took a piece of powder blue chalk from a fold in the sheets and held it up for me to see.

“You may need this,” she said.

“Colored chalk?” I asked.

“No, Sarah. Not colored chalk. This,” and now she leaned forward, her body rustling like a blustery day in October, and she used the stick of chalk to draw something on the floor between us.

“I’m never going to be able to remember all that,” I said, and, indeed, whatever she wrote or drew, I’d forgotten it completely by the time the dream ended and I awoke.

Constance scowled, the way she does. “I can hardly do everything for you,” she said and then pointed at what she’d written on the attic floor. “I can hardly make it any more perfectly straightforward than that.”

“My memory isn’t what it used to be, that’s all.”Constance shrugged, dislodging a few more leaves. She sat up straight again, and she closed her legs, so I could no longer see her vagina.

“Is it a cipher?” I asked.

“It’s a door,Sarah. And like all doors, it tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch. It must be kept locked, and someone has to keep the keys. But I imagine you know that already. Amanda would have told you that.”

“Her name isn’t Amanda.”

“No, but that’s what you call her, when you write about her. You call her Amanda. Or Helen.”

I was no longer in the attic, then, but sitting at the kitchen table, my fingertips resting on the typewriter’s brass keys. I was looking out into the August night towards the red tree, and there was that bloated moon. And there, below the moon, was the flickering glow of the bonfire. I began typing, trying to recollect what Constance had drawn with her blue chalk.

This is my dream. What I remember of it, and for what it might be worth. I have to leave this room now, and find out whether or not I am alone in the house.

CHAPTER NINE

She’s gone.

Or maybe all that I can say with certainty is that Constance Hopkins is no longer here.

Or, perhaps, simply that I am unable to find her.

Which is not to say that, upon entering the attic, I found nothing.

I’m sitting at the dressing table, staring at one of the sheets of onionskin paper held fast in the typewriter’s carriage, and my fingers move hesitantly across the keys. My head is filled to bursting with images, and with the implications and consequences of what I have seen, what I stillsee, sleeping and awake. But I seem never to have learned the language that I require to describe what is happening to me. If that language even exists.

I can’t say what’s made me sit down at the typewriter again, unless it’s merely force of habit, or a sense that I am helpless to do anything else, or a delusion that this is better than talking to myself. I almost called someone. Who, though? That’s the catch. Well, the first catch. Who would I have possibly fucking called? Who would have begun to understand the things that need to be said? My agent? My editor? Squire Blanchard? An ex? One of those various people I haven’t heard from since I left Atlanta? A “writer friend” in New York or Boston or Providence or LA or San Francisco? Some family member I’ve not seen in twenty years? I sat on the sofa and held the cell phone for a time, and I opened it twice, but every number I might have “dialed” seemed equally irrelevant.

I found my car keys, and I considered the undeniable wisdom of driving away, driving anywhere that isn’t here, and never looking back. I suspect that I could probably torch the house without getting much more than a stern “thank you” letter from Blanchard. Isn’t that how these haunted-house stories usually end, with a purification by fire? Isn’t that the handy old cliché?

I didn’t telephone anyone. I didn’t drive away. I’m not going to burn the house down and sow the charred ground with salt. And I’m not going after the tree with a chain saw or a hatchet or a can of gasoline. The worst I am capable of is following Virginia Woolf’s example and filling my pockets with stones before walking into the local equivalent of the River Ouse.

I have gone to the attic, and Constance isn’t there, but I still do not know if I am alone in the house.

I seem to have been afflicted with some unprecedented calm, something that settled over me while I was upstairs and which shows no signs of abating. Again, I know we’re ru