See Now Then Read Free Page B

children would like the fresh air. I hate fresh air, the idea of it, fresh air does not have Duke Ellington and I love Duke Ellington and often as a child, sitting in my bedroom alone, I imagined myself to be Duke Ellington, domineering and dominating my orchestra filled with brilliant musicians on the various horns and drums and then composing grand pieces of music that would never be received with respect and recognized as the works of genius that they are, then and now, the equal of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and this fills me with despair, for I see myself as Duke Ellington and I see myself as Alban, Anton, Arnold. And in this Shirley Jackson house, nestled in the crotch of the prison of a village in New England, I now live with that passenger, questionable passenger, on a banana boat, for is she a passenger or is she a banana? If she was a banana was she inspected? If she was a passenger, how did she get here? My mother was right: someone who arrives on a banana boat is suspect; to eat bananas in January is strange and a luxury. In any case, in winter, as a boy I ate Rice Krispies with sliced bananas for breakfast while sitting at the foot of my parents’ bed and the bananas had no taste that I can remember, they were bananas, a constant and an inevitability like the elevator arriving when I pushed a button that summoned it or like the maid being condescended to by my mother; in any case, life is a series of inevitabilities; in any case, one day my mother died and before that, my father died and I was all alone.”
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    Now and Then, Mrs. Sweet said to herself, though this was done only in her mind’s eye, as she stood at the window, unmindful of the rage and hatred and utter disdain that her beloved Mr. Sweet nurtured in his small breast for her, now and then, seeing it as it presented itself, a series of tableaux. The mountains Green and Anthony, the lake, the river, the valley that lay spread out before her, all serene in their seeming permanence, all created by forces that answered to no known existence, were a refuge from that tormented landscape that made up Mrs. Sweet’s fifty-two-year-old inner life. No morning arrived in all its freshness, its newness, bearing no trace of all the billions of mornings that had come before, that Mrs. Sweet didn’t think, first thing, of the turbulent waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. She thought of that landscape before she opened her eyes and the thoughts surrounding that landscape made her open her eyes. Her eyes, dark, impenetrable Mr. Sweet would say, as he looked into them, at first he said the word impenetrable with delight, for he thought of discovering something not yet known to him, something that lay in Mrs. Sweet’s eyes and that would make him free, free, free from all that bound him, and then he cursed her dark eyes, for they offered him nothing; in any case his own eyes were blue and Mrs. Sweet was indifferent to that particular feature of his. But Mrs. Sweet’s eyes were not impenetrable at all to anyone else and everyone she met wished that they were so; for behind her eyes lay scenes of turbulence, upheavals, murders, betrayals, on foot, on land, and on the seas where horde upon horde of people were transported to places on the earth’s surface that they had never heard of or even imagined, and murderer and murdered, betrayer and betrayed, the source of the turbulence, the instigator of the upheavals, were all mixed up, and the sorting out of the true, true truth and the rendering of judgments, or the acceptance of wrongs, and to accept that, to accept and lay still with being wronged will wear you down to nothing so that eventually you are not more than the substance that makes up the Imperial Sand Dunes in the Imperial Valley in California, or the pink beaches surrounding the rising shelf of landmass that is now, just now, the island of Barbuda, or the lawn of a house in Montclair, New Jersey. But those