Galilee. Clive Barker

what,” she said, still studying the laden shelves. “I don’t think it’s right.” She reached in and took out a pie with either hand, then, pirouetting with a grace surprising in one of her extreme bulk, turned and closed the refrigerator door with her backside. “So don’t expect me to be unburdening myself.”

      She was talking about the book of course. Her antipathy was perfectly predictable, given that she knew it to be at least in part Marietta’s idea. Even so, I wasn’t in the mood to be harangued.

      “Let’s not talk about it,” I said.

      She set the pies—one cherry, one pecan—on the table side by side. Then she went back to the refrigerator, with a little sigh of irritation at her own forgetfulness, and took out a bowl of whipped cream. There was a fork already in the bowl. She lowered herself gently onto a chair and set to, loading up the fork with a little cherry pie, a little pecan, and a lot of whipped cream. She clearly had done this countless times before; watching the skillful way she created these little towers of excess, without ever seeming to drop a crumb of pastry into the cream, or a spot of cream onto the table, was an entertainment unto itself.

      “So when did you last hear from Galilee?” she asked me.

      “Not in a long while.”

      “Huh.” She delivered a teetering mound between her lips, and her lids flickered with bliss as she worked it around her mouth.

      “Does he ever write to you?”

      She took her leisurely time to swallow before answering. “He used to drop me a note now and again. But not any more.”

      “Do you miss him?”

      She frowned at me, her lower lip jutting out. “Don’t start that,” she said. “I told you already—”

      I rolled my eyes. “In God’s name, Zabrina, I just asked—”

      “I don’t want to be in your book.”

      “So you said.”

      “I don’t want to be in anybody’s book. I don’t want to…be talked about. I wish I was invisible.”

      I couldn’t help myself: I smirked. The very idea that Zabrina, of all people, would dream of invisibility was sadly laughable. There she was, conspiring against her own hopes with every mouthful. I thought I’d wiped the smirk off my face by the time she looked up at me, but it lingered there, like the cream at the corners of her own mouth.

      “What’s so funny?” she said.

      I shook my head. “Nothing.”

      “So I’m fat. And I wish I was dead. So what?”

      The smirk had gone now. “You don’t wish you were dead,” I said. “Surely.”

      “What have I got to live for?” she replied. “I’ve got nothing. Nothing I want anyway.” She put down her fork, and started on the cherry pie with her fingers, picking out the syrupy fruit. “Day in and day out, it’s the same story. Serving Momma. Eating. Serving Momma. Eating. When I sleep I dream I’m up there with her, while she talks about the old days.” With sudden vehemence she said: “I hate the old days! What about tomorrow? How about doing something about tomorrow?” Her face, which was, as I mentioned, flushed to begin with, was now beet red. “We’re all so passive,” she said, the vehemence mellowing into a sadness. “You got your legs back but what did you do with them? Did you walk out of here? No. You sat exactly where you’d been sitting all these years, as though you were still a cripple. That’s because you still are. I’m fat and you’re a cripple, and we’re going to go on, day after day after day living our useless lives, till somebody from out there—” she pointed out toward the world “—comes and does us the kindness of putting a bullet through our brains.”

      With that, she rose from the ruins of the pies, and made her exit. I didn’t attempt to delay her. I just sat back in my chair and watched her go.

      Then, I will admit, I sat for a while with my head in my hands and wept.

       VI

      i

      Assaulted by both Marietta and Zabrina, feeling thoroughly uncertain of my talents, I returned to my room, and sat up through the rest of the night. I’d like to tell you that I did so because I was agonizing over the literary problems I had, but the truth was rather more prosaic: I had the squirts. I don’t know whether it was the baked ham, the braised aubergine, or Zabrina’s damn conversation that did it: I only know I spent the hours till dawn sitting on my porcelain throne in a private miasma. Somewhere around dawn, feeling weak, raw, and sorry for myself, I crawled into bed and snatched a couple of hours of sleep. By the time I woke my slumbering mind seemed to have decided that I’d be best writing about Rachel and Mitchell’s wedding in a rather curter style than I’d been employing so far. After all, I reasoned, a wedding was a wedding was a wedding. No use belaboring the subject. People could fill in the pretty details for themselves.

      So then: the bare facts. The wedding took place in the first week of September, in a little town in New York State called Caleb’s Creek. I’ve already mentioned it in passing, I believe. It’s not far from Rhinebeck, close to the Hudson. A pretty area, much beloved of earlier generations of American royalty. The Van Cortandts built a home up here; so did the Astors and the Roosevelts. Extravagant houses where they could bring two hundred guests for a cozy weekend retreat. By contrast, the property George Geary had purchased in Caleb’s Creek was a modest place, five bedrooms, colonial style: described in one book about the Gearys as “a farmhouse,” though I doubt it was ever that. He’d loved the place; so had Deborah. After his death she’d many times remarked that the best times of her life had been spent in that house; easy, loving times when the rest of the world was made to wait at the threshold. It was actually Mitchell who had suggested opening the house up again—it had been left virtually unvisited since George’s death—and holding the wedding celebrations there. His mother had warmed to the idea instantly. “George would like that,” she’d said, as though she imagined the spirit of her beloved husband still wandering the place, enraptured by the echoes of happier times.

      To clinch the deal, Mitchell drove Rachel up to Caleb’s Creek in the middle of July, and they stayed over at the house for one night. A couple from the town, the Rylanders, who had been housekeeper and gardener during the halcyon days, and had kept the place clean and tidy during its years of neglect, had worked furiously to give the house a second chance at life. When Mitchell and Rachel arrived it looked like a dream retreat. Eric Rylander had planted hundreds of flowers and rosebushes, and laid a new lawn; the windows, doors, and shutters had been painted, so had the white picket fence. The small apple orchard behind the house had been tidied up, the trees pruned; everything made orderly. Inside, Eric’s wife Barbara had been no less diligent. The house had been thoroughly aired, the drapes and carpets cleaned, the woodwork and furniture polished until it shone.

      Rachel was, of course, completely charmed. Not just by the beauty of the house and brightness of the garden, but by the evidence everywhere of the man who’d fathered her husband-to-be. At Deborah’s instruction the house had been left as George had liked it. His hundreds of jazz albums were still on their shelves, all alphabetically arranged. His writing desk, where according to Mitchell he’d been making notes for a kind of memoir about his mother Kitty, was just as he’d left it, arrayed with framed family photographs, which had lost most of their color by now.

      The visit had not only served to confirm Mitchell’s instincts that this was indeed the place to have the wedding; it had turned into a kind of tryst for the lovers. That night, after a splendid supper prepared by Barbara, they’d stayed up sitting out watching the midsummer sky darken, sipping whiskey and talking about their childhoods; and of their fathers. It had got so dark they couldn’t even see one another’s faces, but they kept talking while the breeze moved in the apple trees: about times they’d laughed, times they’d lost. When, finally,