See Now Then Read Free

an auditorium that was built to seat three hundred people and only ten or twenty people had been in those seats when he was sitting at the piano playing the music written by a man who was a citizen of Russia who wrote this music that so captivated the very soul, whatever that may be, of Mr. Sweet was in distress, knowing and yet not knowing death itself in all its not-knownness. What is the essence of Love?
    But Mrs. Sweet was looking out at her life: from the Shirley Jackson house, across the way lay the mountains Green and Anthony and laying beneath them were the rivers: Paran and Battenkill and Branch, bodies of water, full of trout hungry for a midafternoon hatch of invertebrates, and all these rivers flow into the Hudson River, a body of water, one of many tributaries to that larger body of water, the Atlantic Ocean, all of them flowing there except for the Mettowee which flows into Lake Champlain; and she was thinking of her now, knowing that it would most certainly become a Then even as it was a Now, for the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then, and that the past and the present and the future has no permanent present tense, has no certainty in regard to right now, and she gathered up her children, the young Heracles who would always be so, no matter what befell him, and the beautiful Persephone, who would always be so, beautiful and perfect and just.
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    But her head was not lying on the yellow kitchen counter, severed from her body, with the rest of her scattered into time: her torso preserved in mud near the Delaware Water Gap, her legs in a granite outcrop in the Ahaggar massif, her hands in the shifting sands of the Imperial Sand Dunes, and an exquisite sight are all these presentations to be found in that thing called Nature but Mr. Sweet could never see this, for it frightened him to leave his familiar surroundings, the Shirley Jackson house and all the nice furnishings in it: the sofa and chairs that were covered in cloth that Mrs. Sweet had purchased at the Waverley factory outlet in Adams, Massachusetts, and the upholstery itself, which had been done by a man who lived in White Creek, New York. He made a nestlike space for himself in the room above the garage, a studio in which he wrote many things, and it looked like a replica of the welcome area of a funeral home, so thought Mrs. Sweet and that thought almost killed her; but he loved that room, for it was dark and full of all sorts of things that he loved, his memories of Paris, France, deviled eggs, his many collections of the Claudine books, the picture of the little girl he asked to undress when they were both six years old, the picture of his student he was in love with when she was seventeen and he was twenty-seven, the puppets he made when he was a child, the delicious puddings he ate when he was a little child, the old stubs of tickets from the city ballet, the old stubs of tickets from the theater, all little mementos from a time so precious to him: his childhood; but she was such a beast, such a bitch and a beast and she must not be allowed anywhere near this room and he kept it locked and she was never allowed in it and he kept the key with him all the time, except when he got into bed with her, he placed it in a secret place, a place so secret that he never thought of it, for fear she might read his thoughts. Who knew what she was capable of? People who come on banana boats are not people you can really know and she did come on a banana boat. All the same her head was not lying on the kitchen counter and the kitchen counter was covered in yellow Formica, an idea very revolting to Mr. Sweet, for a kitchen counter should be white or marble or just plain wood but Mrs. Sweet would go out of her way to find such an abomination, yellow Formica, to cover the counter and then she would paint the wall in the kitchen those Caribbean colors: mango, pineapple, not peaches and nectarine: “My house