The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 5

I looked at them all sitting around the table, drew in a breath and said, “We’ll activate the ship’s coils at nine A.M. tomorrow. The Isabel should be in orbit by noon and into a warp an hour after.” My head ached, but my mind was clear.

“Terrific, Captain!” Charlie said. Ruth smiled toward me. Everyone looked cheerful. They had known we would be leaving tomorrow, but this was the first official announcement of it.

“Before you start planning your homecomings, I have some news for you that you won’t like,” I said. I paused only a second. “We are taking a detour by Belson. I’m staying there.”

They were dismayed and they fussed and fumed about it. I thought for a while they might even mutiny. But eventually they accepted it. We were, as I had said, in our warp shortly after lunchtime the next day. By suppertime I was in my chemical sleep. Twelve days. That was the time from Aminidab to Fomalhaut. It was taking them twenty-four days out of their way home, and I didn’t blame them for being pissed. But there was enough fuel for it and I promised them all a bonus for the extra time.

When I came out of my sleep and went up to the bridge and looked out the window, there was Belson at about the size the moon is when seen from Earth. It looked as empty as the moon. I had awakened with cold in my gut and remembered no dreams; the sight of that planet of black glass sent a deep chill into my soul; it was all I could do not to quail at it and tell Ruth not to land. Where did these spooky feelings come from, anyway? I had never felt anything but love for Belson—even when it had broken my arm.

I steeled myself, shook off the bad feelings as well as I could, and told Ruth to pick a spot on the other side of the planet from where we were before. She was shocked to hear my voice. She had been sitting hunched over the controls when I came in and hadn’t looked up. Somehow she had cut her hair. It looked nice short. She blinked at me and then frowned slightly. “Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning, Ruth. Find us a big plain of obsidian and come down on it. I don’t want us hurting the grass.”

“Okay, Captain,” she said. And she did it. Within two hours she had set us down on the planet’s day side without even a bump. Out the portholes was Belson, looking the same here as on its other side. And my spooky feelings had evaporated. I couldn’t wait to get out there and start making my homestead.

It took a week. On the first day we explored the new area just to make sure. There was a higher proportion of obsidian to grass here, but that was the only difference. On the second and third days I erected myself this shack of moonwood, with the help of five crew members.

We outfitted it from the ship. We carried out the little red computer that I use for writing this journal, four of the Nautilus machines, eighteen cases of wine and, from the ship’s garden, an array of hydroponics. I have my Eames chair, a mattress, my books and a very serious voice-activated recorder for recording the song of the Belson grass. A lot of food, a lot of whiskey, the drug synthesizer, seeds and hydroponics. I am relatively happy now.

My stateroom aboard the Isabel was not much bigger than my bathroom at the Pierre; it barely held my narrow bed, my Eames chair and a small desk. Above the desk was a narrow bookshelf, and to the right of it a hatchway that led into my private head. Whatever Chinese had designed the head had placed things so that when I sat on the john I faced a porthole that gave a view of the Milky Way; the clarity of the view was, shortly after I arose in the mornings, breathtaking. Being in spacewarp and at an analogy travel rate of two hundred times the speed of light did not affect it. I sat on the can in the mornings and watched the starry universe.

There was a kind of anteroom to the stateroom, and it was much larger. The Chinese had used it as a captain’s mess and boardroom for staff meetings. Since I either ate with the crew or with one guest in my stateroom and since there were no staff meetings, that room was the ship’s gym. During my long sleep I had been carried from my bed daily, worked out and returned; I had had the gym installed next door to simplify that maneuver. There were five Nautilus machines in there; after I was wakened I would work out for an hour each morning and then shower back in my head. It was a good routine. It was good to be away from the Earth and without a telephone, to eat breakfast alone and then move my bowels and then build up a sweat on the equipment. I especially liked working my pectorals and quadriceps until they bulged and hardened. I still work out here on Belson and the machines are better; they have regular weights now instead of springs. But sometimes I miss that little gym on the Isabel; I’ll be working away at leg curls, say, and my mind will go back to those days, to my scrambled eggs eaten at my stateroom desk, to the satisfactions of the journey I am still taking, into myself. Looking back on it, now I feel that my decision to come to Fomalhaut was inspired. The Belson grass and all the things that happened on Juno, even the dreams of my father’s study, were important in bringing about change; and yet sometimes it seems that my mornings on the Isabel alone, my breakfast, my shit, the stars, the Nautilus machines and the sweat that covered my hardening body and the cold shower afterward were what really changed me and began to thaw the glacier that was crushing my soul.

Many middle-aged men can’t seem to change their lives at all. The more scrubby and dour things get, the less rewarding the compensatory pleasures become, the more we tend to hang on and to fear attempting a new bargain with life. I felt that way before I bought the Isabel. The only thing was that I damn well knew my life was getting worse. I wasn’t moving anywhere, and the price for staying where I was was going up. Much of this was invisible to me; but the same voice that could tell me to sell a company no matter what the stock was going for was telling me to pull out. Good ratios all around. Good performance record too. But time to unload nonetheless. Time to sell, move, get out.

I saw my father die. He was the age I am now—fifty-two. Somebody had taken out his false teeth and his mouth closed up like a fist; a sound, half gag and half rattle, came from somewhere inside. It was as though whatever soul he owned had shrunk like a handful of dried peas in a never-opened pod and it was rattling around inside him now. Too late, I thought, too late! He needed a shave. It was the only time I had ever seen him in need of a shave. Somehow for once he looked like a man, in that last grim spasm. The son of a bitch. That was his price for staying where he was. One long soul-shaking shudder and down the tubes. Well. If there’s a life after death he’s probably avoiding it now.

As, come to face it, I am avoiding my own life.

Well, to hell with my life for now. That mess back on Earth. Isabel and money; money and Isabel. Anna! Some nagging voice in me tells me to feel guilty because I am lying on my ass on a barren planet and shooting dope. Because I am not engagé. Because I am shunning relationships. Because I have become asexual and detached. Well to hell with that voice. It’s the one I ignore when I want to make money. I am going to lie on my foam mattress and listen to the grass when it chooses to speak to me or sing to me. I have been a sick man lately; I need respite. I need to do what I need to do to get well. My father decided to die when he was my age; I decided to come to Belson. It beats death. And I can go back.

And that’s how I got to where I am now, tending the seedlings in my hydroponic garden, twenty-three light-years from New York and as alone as the prisoner of Chillon. The Isabel left for Earth three months ago and I fell into my routine here on Belson as though I were born for it. It has been a spare and nearly empty time and one my soul has needed. For some reason during the last week—I count by Earth time on my Chinese watch—each Belson day at twilight the rings have come out for about a half hour and glowed like a giant and perfect rainbow in the green sky. That is the climax of my Belson day; I feel the rings do it because I’m here. Belson’s first resident. I take no morphine after ringtime; I lie on the hard foam mattress on my moonwood porch and stare up at the sky. Sometimes I look at my former sun, Sol. From here it is an undistinguished speck of a star, and because of its distance I see it as it was twenty-three years ago, as I saw it when I was thirty and afraid of love.

Sometimes I fall asleep while staring at the sky. Sometimes I read by the light of a little nuclear lamp, or dictate into my red computer as I am doing now, writing this. I am never lonely here. Sometimes the grass sings to me. Often I lie on it, but it has never again said, “I love you.”

As the ship left Belson, first trembling, then roaring and howling its way upward to and immediately beyond the clouds, great fissures appeared in the obsidian plain around me; the Isabel disappeared upward with an alacrity that was astonishing. I had never watched a spaceship take off before and it was spectacular to see all that power unleashed. The air smelled electric—some mixture of ozone and of the unburned residue of the Isabel’s solid fuel, used only for takeoff and landing. She had vanished from the sky with Ruth and Howard and Mimi and all the others aboard, and the smell remained. She would go into orbit, then go nuclear and, after a half hour or so, when her capacitors were charged, into spacewarp, somewhere both within and outside the knowable universe, shimmering, taking that nondimensional road back to Sol and Earth and her landing pad in the Florida Keys. And I was here alone, as far from home as a man had ever tried to live. For a few moments my arms and knees trembled. I was scared shitless.

I stood there and then I looked around me at the glass planet where I stood and where I had elected to live for six months completely alone. Alone without even the cockroaches famed for friendship with Devil’s Island prisoners, growing their cave beards in solitary; alone without the consolation of a bird, a snake, a distant rustle of tree limbs. What in the name of God was I doing? What was I doing to myself? And the word jumped into my head as alive as Athena when she sprouted from the brow of the Cloudmaster himself: masochist. Ben Belson, masochist.

Oh, yes. The cat is out of the bag, the cards are turned face up on the dirty green cloth, and the Devil has come out from behind his disguise as Dolly the Chambermaid. I could have left Anna in a flash, with her rubber girdle at her feet. Divorce is awfully easy. I’m rich. I did not leave Anna, not for all those years of berating myself for being the wrong kind of husband for her. What a goddamned painful tango we danced. Well. You marry a woman like Anna when you’re afraid.

Afraid of love. I might as well face it. That’s the truth of it. I was afraid of Isabel and that’s why I moved out of her apartment and into that suite at the Pierre. That’s why I came chugging halfway across the cosmos in this Chinese spaceship—Flower of Heavenly Repose. Oh yes. Look here, Officer, my name is Ben Belson, the celebrated millionaire financier, friend to famous and beautiful women, theater buff, prowler of the galaxy and closet Marxist. Big hands, big feet, big prick and a booming voice. And a big, throbbing, empty hole in my heart.

The day after Isabel got the part in Hamlet we celebrated with steaks at a neighborhood restaurant. Isabel was radiant. Her complexion was luminous against her gray sweater and silver jewelry, her curly gray hair. I was pleasant on the outside but inside sullen. She had three glasses of wine; I had club soda. I had nearly given up drinking a few years before, after spotting some handwriting on the wall about what happened to people who drank gin with their scrambled eggs. In those days I was free of bad habits—especially of fucking. I smiled as Isabel drank her wine and talked about how much the part meant to her, but inside I sulked like a child.

That evening she sat by the fire with a cat in her lap and a beat-up paperback of Hamlet propped on the cat. She was underlining Gertrude’s speeches in red. I busied myself cleaning up the breakfast dishes, clanging pans from time to time to let my presence be felt. Fifty years old and often on the cover of Time or Peking, a “basic force” in world finance, as Forbes called me once, the terror of boardrooms and a mover and a shaker on Wall Street, and there I am in Isabel’s little New York kitchen clanging the frying pan against the steel sink because I’m pissed and jealous. Because she’s more interested in a play than in me. Because I can’t get it up with her and haven’t in the months we’ve lived together. Clang goes the pan as I set it back on the wood-burning stove, scrubbed. And from here in my self-imposed exile on Belson I can see I was angry with Isabel because she was a beautiful, smart, erotic woman who wanted me to fuck her. The very idea, I was saying in my heart, as I scrubbed bacon grease off that morning’s breakfast plates. Who in the hell does she think she is? said that scared child in my mossy old rib cage. I dried the silverware with a cloth and could hear the cat purring in Isabel’s lap. I wanted to wring its neck. Inside me an angry virginity smoldered, grimly loyal to a pair of miserable ghosts. I started throwing the silverware into its shallow drawer. Take that, you goddamn knives and forks! Son of a bitching, goddamned spoons! Isabel murmured pleasantly over her text, underlining speeches, occasionally stroking the big cat, Amagansett, in her lap. I slammed the silverware drawer shut and stated, with great control in my voice, “Hamlet is an overrated play.” Ben Belson, literary critic.

“Huh?” Isabel said. There was an edge in her voice; she had picked up the sound of a gauntlet falling. “What’s that, sweetheart?”

“Hamlet,” I said, “is an overrated fucking play. It’s too long, too wordy, and it has too many corpses on the floor.” I dried my hands off on the towel, walked over and stood by the fire. The other cat, William, saw me coming and slinked away. Those fucking beasts pick up vibrations. “Nobody really knows what Hamlet’s about, either. That’s a lousy recommendation for a play.”

Isabel marked her place with an ivory bookmark and then looked up at me coolly. “T.S. Eliot said it’s about a boy’s disgust with his mother.”

That one stopped me for a second, but I shook it off. I was in no mood to explore my own psyche. What I wanted was to work on Isabel’s. There she sat, content by the fire, happy in her career and her pussycats, warmhearted and serene. And here I stood with a rage in my otherwise empty heart and my big, calloused hands trembling. I got those callouses from chopping cords of wood, in fury, at my country home in Georgia, every time the Dow went the wrong way. Inside, there in New York, I am a complete mess, a bridge hand without a face card, a barren, angry hulk of impotence, a sick and furious motherfucker, and I say to Isabel, “Is something bothering you?” She should have brained me with a lump of coal.

She looked up at me steadily before she spoke. “Ben,” she said. “You look ready for homicide, or worse. I don’t want to talk about Shakespeare with you right now.”

A part of me recognized that she was completely right. So I counterattacked. I tried to relax my features into something more amiable. Plausible anyway. I went back to the kitchen—actually just a space along one wall with a small stove and a dish cabinet in it—and started heating water for tea. I looked at my watch. A little after 11 P.M. “Isabel,” I said. “You can get awfully snotty when you talk about the theater. Do you feel Shakespeare’s something holy? Too holy for a businessman to discuss?”

The black cat leaped off her lap at that one. “Ben,” Isabel said, “for Christ’s sake come off it. I’m not a Shakespeare snob and you know it.”

Something glowed in me. I had her there. “What about that time we saw Henry the Fifth? All that talk you gave me about the audience not being able to feel the cadences.” I was standing by the fireplace again, striking a pose of sweet reasonableness. “The fucking cadences.” I looked at her face. I could see I had hit home. Something inside me thrilled at it.

“Damn you, Ben,” she said. “If you didn’t have a bloody tin ear yourself you’d have known what I was talking about. Shakespeare was a poet.”

“Bullshit!” The fact was that I didn’t know beans about Shakespeare but I did sense that Isabel had mixed feelings about liking him and being in one of his plays. I felt I had something there. “Bullshit!” I said again, getting into it. “Shakespeare was a middle-class Englishman and he sucked up to aristocrats and the only people he endowed with classy feelings were princes and generals and emperors. The rest of his characters are drunks and clowns.”

Isabel didn’t even look up. “And women,” she said. Then, “Your tea water’s boiling.”

“Thanks,” I said, and walked back to the kitchen wall with what felt like controlled dignity. Actually, my mind and heart were a muddle. One thing about impotence: you miss the clarity that comes after an orgasm. Sometimes it felt as though my unspilled semen was backed up to my brain and had shortcircuited half the connections there. And what was there to do about such a muddle except to shout at Isabel? “I hate snobbery!” I shouted. “Goddamn it, I hate the way you want it both ways, Isabel: you want to be a Communist and bleed for the masses and you cultivate the tastes of an aristocrat. Antique English silverware”—I gestured toward the nail on which hung Isabel’s safety-deposit key; she kept her Georgian service for twelve in a vault—“and antique furniture. You wouldn’t let a veneer in the door. You wouldn’t so much as set your pinky down on a surface that wasn’t hand-rubbed by forelock-tuggers in a fucking English sweatshop. You’re proud as a pumpkin of being a daughter of the People’s Republic of Scotland, but the only barricade you’ve ever stood near had footlights on it.”

I felt a muted brotherhood with Shakespeare. Way to talk, Bill! I looked at Isabel and it seemed as if she were far away. Everything seemed far away. Isabel was staring into the fire, where my Mafia coal was burning. Her face was pale and drawn—impassive. Then she raised her eyes to my face silently and I saw something awfully, horribly hurt there, something that twisted me in the stomach and suddenly brought me back into the room with her. “Why are you talking like that, Ben?” she said.

I thought suddenly of Lulu and Philippe, the two California seals at the Central Park Zoo. I would walk up there sometimes around noon to buy one of the four-dollar hot dogs that the vendors sell. I needed to get out of the apartment from time to time and I’d walk up Fifth Avenue, by all those empty stores and then, near the park, by the run-down apartment buildings. The park itself was always a bit depressing, its trees long gone to wood thieves, and the zoo was full of empty cages that nobody wanted to have heated anymore. There hadn’t been an elephant in the place for forty years. But there were still some birds and an aquarium, and the big heated pool was still there with its two California sea lions. I’d buy my hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard and then go, huddled against that awful winter in my mackinaw and scarf and long underwear, and look at the seals while I ate. When they swam they rubbed their smooth bodies against one another in a kind of continuous “Hello.” The love in this was perfectly clear and as easy as sunshine, even in what must have been for those displaced Californians a frigid environment. To say the least. Yet they were full of life and of straightforward affection for one another. Why couldn’t Isabel and I, two grown homo sapiens, be like that? Why couldn’t I? What the hell? What was wrong?

Isabel appeared to be on the edge of tears, and there was a grimness in her profile that moved me. There was old Scots’ darkness in her eyes and heaviness in her brow. “My God, Isabel,” I said, “I’m sorry as hell. What am I saying?”

She looked at me quickly and then looked away.

“What do I know about Shakespeare?” I said.

She spoke quickly and her voice was soft and distant. “That’s not it, Ben. It’s not Shakespeare.”

“I know,” I said, becoming explanatory now. “I know it isn’t. I don’t know why I…”

“Don’t explain, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Just shut up. You’re not talking to me. You haven’t talked to me all evening.” She stared at me hard. “Don’t you know, Ben, that the things you say hurt?”

I stared at her. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I’ll fix tea.”

On her bathroom wall Isabel kept a hologram of herself as a seven-year-old, taken for her first day at Socialist Primary School in Paisley. She wears a hand-knitted sweater and a kilt and her eyes hold a look of anxiety. Isabel’s father was at sea for most of her childhood, and her mother was as cold as mine. Sometimes toward the end of our stay together I would see that same anxious look in Isabel’s eyes, in her early forties.

In the hologram she holds a striped cat in her lap. Something in Isabel’s psyche had always drawn her toward cats, and when I moved in with her she had the two, Amagansett and William. I remember shouting at Isabel once in the middle of the night that I could probably get it up for her if she weren’t so damned anxious about it and her saying, levelly, “Don’t get it up for me, Ben. Get it up for yourself!” and knowing with a knot in my stomach that she was right, I padded for refuge into the bathroom and found the two cats huddled behind the base of the sink. They stared up at me with pained, curious eyes. I looked at them silently a minute and then said softly, “She knows everything, boys.”

My red Chinese computer also reads. I can set a book in its drawer and it will turn pages and read aloud in a pleasant, avuncular voice with a midwestern accent. Sometimes I do that with my library books when my eyes are blurred from morphine or I just don’t want to open them. I set the drug synthesizer to make ethyl alcohol, mix it with grape juice from my garden vines, and drink myself into a near-coma while my computer reads the short novels of James: The Lesson of the Master, The Beast in the Jungle, The Pupil. I’ve never read them sober; I’m not sure which has the ball-less William Marcher as protagonist, but I know I see him looking like my father. Distant, lost in terminal self-regard.

I speak in this journal as though my time on Belson were spent in reading and thought; in fact, much of it is passed in the grip of an uneasy lassitude. For the last five days I have been incapable of action or reading or of amusing myself in any significant way. I merely pass time. Often I feel like a fifteen-year-old hanging around the drugstore waiting for someone to drop in. Yesterday I merely waited all day for Fomalhaut to set.

When dusk comes, the sky has a way of modulating its colors that evokes feelings I have no names for. There is nothing like it in the skies of Earth, no pinks and yellows to match these pinks and yellows, no blue-grays so somber as Belson’s. Last night I felt a gentle suffocation as I watched Fomalhaut descending. As it touched the magenta horizon and reflected from the thousand acres of obsidian the suffocation was relieved and my heart expanded with my lungs and I became for a moment dizzied with happiness.

It is a terrible comment on the nature of capitalism that a man as baffled by himself as I can be so successful at it—that I could become so rich and so confused at the same time.

Three days after I moved in with Isabel the temperature dropped to eighteen below zero. It was November 1, 2061. All Saints’ Day. Isabel had a matinee and an evening show and she was out of the apartment all day. I managed to get out onto the icy streets and buy enough wood to make a big fire in the fireplace; I spent most of the day huddled by it, wrapped in a blanket, reading a book called Nuclear Fission in the U.S.: The Loss of Denver. I don’t know why I didn’t find myself a warm hotel room. Yet something told me I should stick with Isabel for that winter, and I didn’t really question it.

She got home a little before midnight, wrapped up in a heavy coat with artificial furs and looking like a Russian countess. Her cheeks were as red as apples. She blew steam by the doorway, stamped her boots and sang out, “Hello, darling.” It thrilled my heart, grumpy as I was, to see her like that.

But a blast of icy air had hit me from the open door and I suddenly found myself furious. “Shut that damned door!” I shouted. And that was the way it often went from then on.

Sometimes, walking through the park that winter, dressed in a parka and muffled like a seal hunter, I would hear Isabel suddenly break out in song:

Her voice was so direct and unaffected that the old child in me wanted to cry at the sound of it. We held hands a lot, squeezing hard to feel one another through mittens.

We walked every day, no matter how cold it was. Isabel is the only woman I know who shares my love for walking the streets of New York. Her gray hair glowed in winter sunlight and she would face the icy air with zip and aplomb; I think I loved her most while striding briskly up Madison or Fifth Avenue in December, seeing the stares she would get from Chinese tourists muffled in their Korean scarves.

Sometimes she would window-shop. At first this was annoying; it seemed to be the customary female dumbness. But gradually I saw that Isabel was as perceptive about clothing as she was about the paintings in museums. She knew a lot about shoes, for instance—more than some people know about life. She had a sense of the sheen and poise of a shoe and eventually made me see it for the piece of minor sculpture it could be. But when I offered to buy she said there wasn’t room in her closets.

Eating at restaurants with her was delightful, and we did it a lot that winter. I think I began to love her a dozen years ago when I first saw her eat truite fumée. She would cut it neatly with her knife, slide an ample slice onto her fork, push a dozen capers on top—still using the knife—and then put it into her mouth and chew with serious concentration. There was nothing prissy in this; Isabel was a formidable trencherwoman and her eating was punctuated with little sighs of pleasure. That was when I was married to Anna; I was backing a play that Isabel had a tiny part in. She had also carpentered one of the sets. I was taken by her intelligent face and her figure and asked her to lunch. Nothing developed from that meeting for a long time, but watching her eat made my heart go out to her. I love people who like to eat and don’t get fat doing it. This woman ate with gusto and had a waist like a girl’s. In the twelve years I’ve known her her hair has become grayer but her figure hasn’t changed. I tingle now to think of that figure, to remember her putting away truite fumée.

We laughed a lot on our walks and in restaurants. We hugged each other spontaneously from time to time. I was delighted by her in hundreds of small ways. But whenever we tried to make love during those five months I found myself with a knot in my stomach and some old smoldering fury in my loins. What had been a happy afternoon of walking and chatting could become a nightmare; sometimes I became withdrawn and bitchy for hours. I should have quit trying altogether; Isabel herself told me I should quit, but I found ways to override her objections. I told her my sexual failures needn’t upset her, that if she were really turned on it might help my problem, that maybe at depth it was she who was afraid of sex. For about two weeks I had her buffaloed. Everybody has sexual fears; I developed Isabel’s like an impresario, trying to cover up my own.

She saw through it eventually. “Goddamn it, Ben,” she said in the middle of a cold night in the loft bed. “You’re the one with the problem and you’re trying to blame me for it.”

I fumed and blustered for a few minutes and finally fell back to sleep. In the morning I waked to see her sleepy-eyed and a bit grim-faced, and said, “I think you’re right.”

Things were better for a while after that. I left her alone and quit trying to act on every sexual tingle I felt—and I felt plenty of them. I slept better. But there was a lot of fury in me, and I felt it building. Much of the time I was good-humored and enjoyed doing what little work I needed to do—which took about three hours a day, mostly on the phone—but inside a pressure was building. I was becoming a time bomb, looking for an excuse to explode. I was scared by this and at the same time exulted in it. Living with Isabel and hating myself for impotence, I had become a sullen, angry, dangerous child.