The Neurosis of Containment
“How horrid I am!” I said then. “How horrid to you my dearest friend and the sanest. Yes, Mrs. Livesday, the sanest creature I know!”
“A sane creature!” She laughed. “I like that. It makes me feel1ike a thing from fairyland. Something Alice might have met on the train in Wonderland. A sane creature! What you need,” she continued, “is a second glass of brandy. This one therapeutic. You are frazzled—that’s clear enough, but surely not beyond repair. This will cause you to sleep and to dream,” she said as she filled my glass, “and to awaken refreshed and lively, full of good spirits. Tomorrow is the flower show—do you remember? And we will enjoy a marvelous time in Rhinebeck. I’ve heard that the displays this year are unlike anything they’ve done previously. You know: the rarest blooms. It will be a treat.” As she spoke I sipped my second brandy dreamily and when it was time for bed, went upstairs feeling tipsy and happier than I had in a very long time. In fact, when I reached my little room I felt so buoyant that had there been a party going on in the music room, I would have returned there and joined in the dancing, a thing I had not done for ever so long—or rather, a thing I, to be honest, had never done. The one who had danced was Abigail. “One too many,” said Father.
For a time I stood upon the threshold staring out across the little bed, the dolls in their perambulators, and as the window was wide open to the night, out across Mrs. Livesday’s south lawn flooded as it was with moonlight. The sight was so inviting, the room so small, so stifling, that I stole back down the stairs and, unlocking the music room’s French doors, out into the night. For a time I stood in the center of the lawn beneath the moon, painfully aware of my unbecoming behavior. The buzzing in my ear had ceased and the only sound the gentle rustle of leaves agitated by the merest whisper of a breeze. Until I heard again, briefly, that sweet trilling, and again-preceded by a hush—that strange, troublous sound.
It was then that I saw what had been haunting me. They moved toward me precisely, inexorably, and gently also, like naked truth I thought; yes, there was something flawless about the way they moved across Mrs. Livesday’s moon-soaked lawn: two tall, beautiful young men, redheaded and pale, moving with a species of subtlety, a rigor, a—I have difficulty finding the words—a meticulousness so that I was held in thrall. And they had wings—enormous, velvety wings of tawny brown and deepest black with spots of blue and green so dark and rich-looking in the moonlight. So stately were they as they moved toward me, their great wings rustling and sighing, that they might have been bishops.
And then they were so close that looking up into their faces I could see how pale their skins were, how delicate, even a little raw around their nostrils, their eyes, and at the corners of their lips, as though they had been weeping or, perhaps, just recently recovered from a malady, or had been out in the cold.
“You have summoned us,” the first one said.
“I, never!”
“You dreamed the cipher,” said the second. “The cipher that, in our world, is an open sesame.” And he laughed.
“What cipher?” I whispered. They were both so beautiful I could not tear my eyes from their faces, their throbbing necks, their shoulders—which were powerful, supporting as they did the greater weight of those terrible wings.
“The cipher of sexual longing.” With his fingers he traced the contours of my aging face lovingly, a tenderness that flooded me with sweetness. Yet I thought his touch sinister, too. I stepped back, and forcing myself to speak—for I was mesmerized by his touch and the heat in his eyes—
“There is no such thing as men with wings. What are you doing in Mrs. Livesday’s garden? I suppose you are burglars,” I said then, simultaneously fascinated and aghast, “and furthermore,” I continued, fighting to get my ire up—for I was so drowsy, so submerged in something I can only—to speak clearly—describe as longing—“who gave you leave to touch me?”
“You gave me, gave us leave,” he said. “Can you deny it?” He stepped behind me so that I was standing between the two of them, the moonlight pouring down upon us like an inverted fountain.
