JAMES
by Victoria Hetherington
Contents:
Seventeen
Twenty-Eight
Thirty-Five
Forty-Six
Fifty-Nine
SEVENTEEN
April 26 1954
My dearest James,
It's been officially spring for a month and five days, but damned if I can tell the difference (gosh, it feels terrific to actually swear without being hit over the head by a nun, even if it's just in writing)!! It's as rainy as it ever was, and just as cold. Sister Sarah says that spring is here because parts of the ground have gotten softer and there are things growing. She says it like it's the most obvious thing in the world, but not all of us spend eighteen hours a day in the gardens!
How is Greta doing? She looked much better at Christmas. How are you two managing that house? I can't imagine how drafty it must be at this time of year. Next time I'm up we're tackling those leaks, Susanne taught me a great trick with bubble gum. It might sound repulsive but the thought of a soggy carpet is far worse, don't you think?
I'm still going positively crazy, but it's nice to have finally have friends (Susanne is the best one; she's really nice but mean sometimes. She's the kind of girl who thinks she rules the world because she has perky bosoms and, truth be told, she does. Rule the world, that is.) So I like the girls more now, but the nuns are still just awful-either they're self-righteous or horribly mean-and the lessons are so long, and none of the girls are a substitute for you.
And oh, the nuns think I'm a virgin! Isn't that a scream? I didn't lie exactly. I guess they just assumed I am because of my age.
The waitress is saying something and James looks up.
"Pardon?"
"Nice name," is what she said. For a wild moment he thinks she is talking about her own-her pink name tag says INGRID-and then sees that she is pointing at the envelope in front of his mug. She has nice fingernails. Not long and red nice, but round and short and nice. He moves the envelope away from her and folds the letter.
"Cynthia. Cynthia. Like a movie star."
"I guess so." He hadn't really thought about it.
"Izzit your girlfriend?" she asks, pouring him some more coffee, slowly; and he half-registers how satisfying it is to have someone else serving him for once.
"I don't really know, Ingrid." Women like it when he calls them by name, and so he does it as much as possible. Sure enough she smiles and puts down the coffeepot and flicks the skirt of her pink little uniform. She's a little too old to be wearing a dress this short, and seems aware of it. She tells him that she's seen him here before, reading letters.
"She writes to you a lot, this woman," the waitress hazards, and James is quiet. She picks up the pot again and cranes her neck to check on her other customers; a pair of farmers talking loudly a few booths away. "Slow day," she says, shrugging, and leaves him alone.
I'm positive that I'll be fat as a cow the next time you see me, dearest. The nuns for all their faults sure know how to cook! Last night it was creamy mashed potatoes, all sorts of frozen vegetables, hot white rolls, hamburgers with some sort of blue cheese that Sister Margaret brings in from Toronto, and piles of gingerbread. You're allowed to serve yourself and so we all just take helping after helping. I've never had food this good! I think it was worth it being a bad girl and getting sent all the way up here just for the dinners.
James comes home and creeps into the kitchen to make his mother tea. Out of all the rooms in the old house, it's the kitchen that's changed the most: there's the brand new television set that Greta bought for Christmas, huge, silent, paneled with oak, and nestled on its own shelf; and a new icebox, since they couldn't afford an electric refrigerator. Two panels of the stained glass window have been broken over the years, and were replaced painstakingly with plain glass. James doesn't let the kettle boil; the tea can't be too hot or she won't be able to drink it. He puts her favorite mug on one of the pewter trays, scrounges for a few digestive biscuits to arrange beside it, and carries the tray up to her room.
It's brighter up here; before he left this morning he'd had the presence of mind to pull open the tapestry curtains. The scents of his mother are the strongest part of his childhood, and they assault him all at once in the doorway-her peppermint drops in tins all over the place, her faint flowery perfume and her soap; her sweat and the heavy scalp-smell of her hair. There's a medicinal tang to the air now, and it's mustier from months of relative inactivity. The stacks of ancient books they've brought up from the library over the years teeter as tall as August weeds: all of a sudden they seem to have sprung to such spindly heights all over the room. Piles of things are scattered over the carpet; pill jars and brushes and empty pens. He tells himself he'll clean this room tomorrow, first thing in the morning, and then knocks twice on the doorjamb. Greta is sitting up in bed with a book open in her lap, and turns her head when she hears him in the doorway. She smiles. "Darling," she calls to him, softly.
He makes his way in.
"How was your day?"
"Good. Okay."
"Served some coffee? Scrubbed some floors?"
"Yup. Yup."
"Customers nice?"
"Oh, they were all right, but there wasn't anyone I knew. Thursday's a bad day for regulars."
He puts the tray gingerly on the bed beside her and hovers right by it, in case anything tips or spills or wobbles. She reaches slowly for her mug. Sunlight pours in. He watches.
"Did you eat, sweetheart?"
"I had a pretty good lunch at Maud's," he says, scanning the floor for crumbs. "The waitresses sure are friendly."
He knows not to ask her how her day was, and asks instead about the book lying open at her elbow instead. How far has she read today?
She blows on her tea triumphantly, even though he knows it's well past lukewarm. One hundred and ninety pages.
The doctor is handsome but stringy as a starving rabbit. He takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers it to James first.
"Thanks."
The doctor then describes what a tumor is and by the end of it James is horrified, perversely reminded of those mushrooms he'd seen on the grass. He imagines them sprouting where there is no air and no room for them; bending spongy flesh out of shape. He tries to correlate that image with his mother's curls, moist and gingery still, with jagged and nauseous success. "How do you know?" he asks.
Headaches, comes the careful reply, from the pressure on her brain tissue.
James is then shown two X-rays, glimmering gray and white. The whitish spots, did he see them? They are her ventricles, inflated with helium. They've been misshapen, and badly. Something is displacing them.
"Numencephalography." The word fills the doctor's grim lips, gray, like the end of his cigarette.
But what can be done? Surgery, it turns out; an operation so invasive that there is a seventy percent chance she'll die under the knife, her head cracked open like a nut and seeping. (Controlled seeping has occurred already; her cerebralspinal fluid had been tapped for the X-ray.) Other than surgery? Exercise. Good plain food. Prayer.
The doctor pauses. "How old are you, son?"
"Twenty," comes the easy lie, lubricated and prompt as a gumball machine.
"Hm. And do you have any close relatives?"
No.
"Any school friends?"
Not really. Greta has home-schooled James; together they've read nearly every book in the old house. His friends are made working in the Chestnut Cafe. Young and vibrant customers come to chat with him and drink espressos, finding him handsome, finding him cool. He makes luminous friends in waves that are swept clean within a few months-no one really lingers longer than that in such a small town. Girls, mostly.
The doctor shakes his head, puts out his cigarette, and spreads hands that are narrow and scarred. I am only a man. "Cancer is a filthy thing," he says quietly.
There is nothing more.
Let's see, what else-well, there's a boy who comes around and cuts the grass and cleans up after Sister Sarah. He's not handsome at all, but lots of the girls have crushes on him. They're all dopes. The oldest ones follow him around with really flimsy excuses. Janice claims that only he really knows how to water a fern and he gives her advice about it for twenty minutes at a time in the back shed-the nerve! I really do miss you, James. Have you received any of my other letters yet? It's not terribly important that I hear back from you right away, I suppose, but it'd be nice to know that somewhere you're reading my silly little thoughts and worries, and missing me too.
They walk around the pond once, twice, Greta leaning heavily on his arm. "There's something so profoundly right about a forest of bulrushes in high noon, don't you think?" she asks, her face tilted happily towards the sun. The top half of each bulrush is granulated like ash, and he wonders if a sturdy wind would be enough to just whisk it all off. He's learned to agree; there's no time for anything else. "Well, sure," he says.
"And look!" This is the third time they've been around the pond now, but she points at the tree as if she's only just seen it, almost breathless. "Look at those apples up top, look how pink they're getting in the sun. This tree, it's heavy with fruit. It's straight out of a Titian."
James smiles; he'll always link Titian with the huge gilt book that they'd pored over six years ago, when Greta was obsessed with teaching him all about art. Mildewed and massive, each heavy page boasted an exquisitely rendered Titian painting. He remembers Diana best; her folds of flesh and long, languid fingers so pale that they nearly glowed in the dim library.
They go a little further and, to their amazement, they see that a chunk has been sheared from the side of the tree that is angled toward the water. The gash is huge and vertical, and spreads from the roots to the uppermost branches. Moisture, perhaps from the pond, has gathered on the white inner trunk, which is almost as soft as flesh. "Would you look at that," he says, marveling. "I wonder where it all went."
She points again at the water directly beneath the tree. "There," she breathes. And there it is indeed, the other half of the crabapple tree, every leaf and round fruit perfect and suspended in the glassy water as if suspended in sap. It no longer resembles a rich oil painting so much as it does an ancient photograph, weathered and rendered in resin. She stares at it hungrily and then they continue along the edge of the pond. The mud has been stirred up and, seemingly overnight, dozens of pristine water lilies have burst into bloom. Nature seems to be rearranging itself. Making room.
Later she reads to him, her voice growing more and more frail. It's one of the last motherly things she can do for him. Tonight it's The Idiot; it's been five months but they've nearly finished it now. She stops reading before the headaches start as they always do at night, and he stays up with her, feeding her mouthfuls of water, administering pills, and finally climbing into bed with her as she starts to cry, frightened and sweat-soaked. He repeats the same few things, little comforting and encouraging things, until his voice is exhausted. They both sink into sleep as the sky grows lighter, the same light and troubled sleep; his hand on the empty water glass and hers resting lightly on the top of his head.
But it's okay if you don't miss me, dear heart. I know you're too busy with Greta to think about girls or anything else. You're as brave as a soldier! Janice is reading over my shoulder and sends her love, which is silly because she doesn't even know you. I love you very much, James.
With the sincerest of wishes,
Cynthia
xxoo
James is at the restaurant later than he's ever been because he has nowhere else to go. Every bit of him feels very dry, from the skin on his palms to the back of his throat.
He tries not to stare too long at anything.
"How about another one, honey?"
It's Ingrid, in all her rumpled glory, pointing at his empty glass. "That depends on what this one was," he says at last. He realizes that he might be drunk.
She laughs like it's the funniest thing she's ever heard. "Rye and water, don't you remember?"
James doesn't bother responding. He's full up with a big horrible thing that's sucking up his moisture, and it's hardening in his veins, in his cavities, and threatening to erupt. He imagines a pond with an unwrinkled surface. Talking disturbs it. Staring disturbs it.
He nods finally, and she whisks away his glass.
She could have taken five minutes to fix his drink and she could have taken an hour. Ingrid comes back and slides it across the scratched table, then perches herself on the edge of the booth. She looks at the envelope under his elbow.
"Izzat from your girlfriend?"
He shakes his head. It's stained and battered from a month of being on Greta's bedside table, under the water glass. It had his name printed neatly on it with her best pen. She hadn't mentioned it and neither had he, but he understood not to touch it and he knew what it was.
"Some other girl, huh?"
He shakes his head again, and sips his new drink. It's amber-colored, and the glass is dirty.
"Bad news, huh," she murmurs. Without so much as putting down her tray, she slides across the table to pat his arm comfortingly. Oh, Ingrid, Ingrid. She could be about his mother's age. Ingrid pauses, and then speaks.
"She didn't deserve you, that girl."
James looks up at her. "I was foul to her," he says, flatly.
"You?" Ingrid laughs again, but it's more contained. "Well there's a surprise. You're such a mild young man. Hell, you're Sir Lancelot compared to the guff I get in here." Likely out of habit she shoots a glance over her shoulder, though there are only two old ladies eating pie and salad, seated separately.
It's a relief for James to turn his attention to this woman, this Ingrid, to focus on her questions and her pinkish freckled skin. Every time he's seen her, her vibrant lipstick has always been brightest where her lips gather tight at the corners. It's faded off, worn off, sucked off everywhere else. He tries to shock her. "Well how about this: it's my fault she's in a school for bad girls."
"Whatcha do? Put the gun in her hand? Talk her into robbing a bank?"
"No, no. Nothing like that."
"What, then?"
"I made love to her and then her parents found out."
Ingrid plunks down the tray. She fiddles in her uniform pocket for a handful of battered cigarettes and a matchbook, looking down at the whole operation with her mouth shut. "She any good?" Ingrid asks, after a moment.
"No." His response is prompt, and flavored with the itch of hay and his slight disgust at how much noise she had made. Cynthia, sweating like a pig. Cynthia, clinging to him like sap, like pine pitch; and her dirty long nails. Cynthia's eyes and mouth, so close to his and slack, vacant, awful. Cynthia's words; cordial and dearest. Cynthia Cynthia Cynthia Cynthia.
Ingrid gets up abruptly to check on the two old ladies. One gets up to leave, clutching Ingrid's hand and saying something kindly and lengthy, then arranges a few pennies beside her mug. As soon as she's gone Ingrid picks them up to count them, and scowls.
"You a student?" Ingrid is back, and busily fitting a cigarette into the lipstick-smeared corner of her mouth. James makes a quick decision and leans across the table to light it for her.
"No," he replies, as she exhales gratefully. Some women look elegant when they smoke, and some don't. Ingrid doesn't-she looks efficient and brisk. It's the most refreshing thing he's seen in days. "I work instead," he adds.
"Oh neat-o. Where?"
"The Chestnut Cafe. Heard of it?"
"Oh, sure," she says, her face lighting up a bit. She's pinpointed a little bit of him now; he exists outside of her orbit in Maud's. "Twenty minutes from here, right? Beside that hardware store. Say, I hear they have an espresso machine."
"That we do," he says, slipping into his work manner for the hell of it. "First one in town-the first in any town except Toronto."
"The big smoke," she says thoughtfully, taking her time with the cigarette. She must ration them. He wonders how much waitresses make, then wonders if she has kids. She sure is old enough. "Is it hard?"
"Pardon?"
"Working the machine."
"Oh, no," he smiles. "You just press a button and this little black jet of espresso comes out into the cup. I do it with a flourish, of course. The girls love a show. Sometimes I get applause."
"Oh, that sounds easy enough-do they have you mopping floors or anything?"
"Not as much as I used to. They've realized that I'm better off chatting up the customers, establishing regulars and all that." He pauses. "You're good at that, too."
She looks at him, almost shy. "I'm not chatting you up, you're a regular without my help." She shrugs. "I just like your company, izzall."
He gives her another smile, slipping the envelope in his pocket. "Likewise, Ingrid."
"Say, you're an articulate young man. It's a shame you're not in college."
James looks at her until she blushes, and then tells her lightly that he doesn't intend on going to college. "I'm going to be a writer."
Her eyes light up again. "Well aren't you something."
"Some nights at the Chestnut we set up a stool and microphone, and people recite poetry," he says. "I haven't missed a single one of those nights. They don't care if you're terrible."
"Do they like your poems?"
"Usually," he says, modestly. He tries to articulate the excitement of one of those nights, the blase women and the names he discusses over coffee-Ginsberg, Coen, Plath. He feels like something new is underway; something new is curling up under itself to gather force like a tsunami, and he's immersed completely. This is it.
"It's wonderful," he says simply. "I really feel like I'm on to something, sometimes."
"That's terrific, it really is." Bold as brass, she reaches across the table to take a sip of his drink.
A mosquito that has been droning for the past few hours is suddenly silent: it has landed on one of them and must be off somewhere now, in paroxysms of simple satiation. It has got what it was after.
He's made love to her quite badly, rushing along like a dog, like the frightened boy he is. The drink she made him in her tiny kitchen, the shy way she told him about her daughter and led him up the stairs -she wants something that baffles him; that he can't possibly provide: she wants a man. Disappointment rises from her as their sweat dries.
"You're just a kid, aren't you," she says, and he all but hangs his head. He is drunk, exhausted, numbed by her alcohol and her skin and his grief.
Ingrid, embarrassed as she stripped herself out of her pink Maud's uniform. Ingrid, propped up in bed, below a wall-hanging cross, her bedside table cluttered with pictures of strange men and strange children. This new, soft Ingrid. She slams herself shut, takes a sleeping pill, and tells him to go home.
He won't, though. He can't. He buries his face in her chest, her breasts and neck and skin all pliable as heated candle wax. She tries to push him away, and then she relents. Ingrid, as old as his mother and naked as the day she was born. He clings to her and cries.
TWENTY-EIGHT
James has lived alone in his grandmother's country house for almost ten years now, and it's the only thing he owns. That Zombies record is on again, echoing strangely in the big empty house, and Melissa is singing along to the organ parts only as she makes coffee in the kitchen downstairs. If James had a choice he'd just listen to Rachmaninoff over and over; nothing else does the trick these days. He hears the icebox opening and the birds outside, warbling in that pitch reserved only for the morning. Morning light, wet grass, little promises. He tries to remember what happened last night and finds it doesn't really matter. Part of the comfort of this relationship is the slight variations on established ground, night after night. A little shift, a falling back, his drink and hers, a wet slip-sliding like heated dew; sleep.
He's waiting to wake up and fall in love.
He has faith.
Melissa dances in, slinky like Claudia Cardinale, holding two tiny espresso cups in one hand and a coffeepot in the other. "Well look at you," he drawls, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. "My naked little coffee goddess."
She makes a little noise, an 'M-hm' that she must think sounds sultry, and plunks her offerings on the bedside table. She crawls onto the bed, and snatches the cigarette. He watches her pull a drag.
"I know you like watching me smoke," she mumbles.
"Do I." he is amused.
"Uh huh. You like it because it's kind of rough, like a Surrey girl, and you don't like nice girls. You like them boyish."
He thinks about it. "You know what I like?" he reaches to take the cigarette and pin her down. "I like that you bring me coffee. I like that you tell me what I like. I like that the bloody Zombies record just ended and that you're up here and the record player is downstairs."
He gets a slap, a playful one. He gets sharp bird-like kisses, and shoves his nose in her hair, bobbed short and reeking of him. She laughs and expels smoke into his chest, and he feels the heat of her breath and of her teeth, brief and hot and hard too, little bleached beach stones.
When she leaves he'll wander around the house and maybe write a little (he's been published already, two articles and a short story about a woman about to get married that he thought was rubbish but Bridal Weekly adored) and he'll think about going to work. It'll still be dark and he'll trace his night like points of a constellation: the long walk through countryside to the bus stop, then the interminable bus ride, then the office where he sits behind a typewriter and listens to talk of the Space Race and who'll make it to the moon first, America should win, it's our neighbor for all its faults, and he'll come home as it grows lighter, bumping as the concrete gives out and tired tired people drift on and off the bus.
At least it's springtime, it makes him feel younger. It makes the long walks vibrate with warm potential; everything gently dangerous, all the black night-time tendrils and generous long lengths of day, long lengths seeping through the East, faint. At work there is a woman who makes him feel like a little boy. He holds her separate from Melissa, because she is not safe. She could destroy him. She holds within herself the dark potential of all his summer walks, and her lush presence minimizes him extraordinarily. She is his mother and a goddess and everything else, everything feline and sharp all folded up in a little Frenchwoman, and when she catches him watching her, the hard mouth and miniskirts and long, long hair, he does the unimaginable: he blushes.
Melissa knows about her.
"You're thinking about Natalie, aren't you," she accuses, when they don't talk for while. He thinks about all the things he could say and doesn't say them. He realizes he has to say something and says, "Yes."
She leaves.
He wakes up without knowing that he's slept; it's that time of year-time to drowse and slip in and out of the golden afternoon heat. He wakes up and remembers that Melissa pronounced Natalie's name wrong: it's French, Parisian French. Only Natalie says it right. Na-ta-lee. In the broad dusty bed he is heavy in the sunlight. He imagines her here. "Quite an afternoon, hmm?" he offers to dream-Natalie.
"Dore, glorieux," she whispers, perched beside him. He spies her profile out of the corner of his eye, translucent as a leaf, delicate and fresh-sprung.
Natalie stands and drifts about, smoky wisps, this hint of a woman. I don't know what to say to you, he thinks.
"Ne pas parler, alors."
He likes the sound of the words. He wonders how he knows them. "Say something else." He is impressed with himself. He doesn't dare reach for a cigarette.
"Pleurez-vous pour votre mere ?"
My mother. She sits beside him and traces two paths from her eyes to her chin, tear-tracks, as an explanation. "Of course I do. Sometimes when I'm walking or trying to write something or weeding the cracks in the tennis court I cry and cry and cry." Her eyes are bright, and he wonders why she asks. Does he really look so hard?
She, of course, can read his thoughts. "Non. Je pense que vous etes trop dur parfois. Cela est pourquoi je demande." You're too hard sometimes. That is why I ask. "And I'm bound to get harder still, I'm afraid," he says, feeling his life stretching on ahead. There isn't enough yet behind him, it feels perilous. He knows the real Natalie doesn't know his name, but he vibrates with tender affection for this golden apparition, brief as the warmth of twilight.
"Vous n'etes pas dans l'amour."
"No, I'm not in love. Not with Melissa. And I won't be." The admission sets him free.
"Vous etes effraye. You are frighten. That you can't love."
Her accent is heavy; it's thick and it covers him like musk or dead flowers. He imagines he tastes soil, but it could be the drinks he had before he woke up. She's right, he is scared. The truth is all coiled up inside of him, fearfully tight.
Instead he offers her a drink. She's wearing a little silk dress, and it's as thin as the petals on the peony buds outside, and in this moment he knows he'll do anything she tells him. She shakes her head. He's said something wrong. Well, fuck. He reaches for the cigarettes.
The next day at work he screws up his courage and asks the real Natalie for dinner. She blinks at him and shrugs, and says something like why not in her accented English; the casual way she goes right back to her typewriter bordering on disdain. He wants to slap her for it. He can't take his eyes off her the whole rest of the day. He can't believe his luck.
Five-o'clock. One by one, people leave the building: the waif-like girl who files things, the rat-like man who sips his coffee too loud, then Natalie. James pulls on his sweater and tucks in his chair. He wants to follow her home and see where she lives; he wants to smell her kitchen and paw through her jewelry box and medicine cabinet, and as the world explodes with thick mid-afternoon sunlight he feel potent, he feels dangerous, he follows her halfway home, allowing at least a block between them at all times. A few children are playing a hopping game, a skipping game, and he shakes himself. Dizzy, he lets her go, and watches until her figure is tiny, dark against the giant sun, wavering like a delicate black flame-smaller, smaller-until it collapses out of sight when she turns a corner.
They meet at a restaurant a few hours later. She is late and wrinkling her nose at the place; the lighting and the noise, so he allows her to takes him somewhere else, amused. She takes him to a French cafe for a meal, her first meal of the day at seven in the evening. The hours pass and he admires the shapes of their bodies in the reflective windows, dim shapes, lovely shapes in the orange twilight of near-summer. It's small, this place, but the coffee is good and the balcony stretches out into the sun and people all seem to be taking their time. He wants her more and more, he marvels at her control and at the way she insists he finishes his food. It's firm and gentle as the growing cling of ivy, like summer when he was a child: clinging to his mother, clinging to heated brick. At the end of the night there is a paltry woman singing in a rat-eaten dress on a stage inside. Everyone has vacated the balcony to go watch and her eyes flick in the direction of the noise, liquid motion he sees beneath her eyelids-huge, luminous-maybe she wants to go inside too. He puts out a hand to stop her, roughly. He doesn't want her to go inside. "Natalie," he says, "I'm not usually like this." He wants to explain following her halfway home, and talking to her when she isn't there, and finds he can't. All he can come up with is an image of Melissa, swimming sadly like a garish little fish in a bowl. So he kisses her. She surprises him by kissing him back, deep possessive kisses like a man's, and then taking him home. Later they will make love on her balcony as the sun finishes setting, huge and bloody, and all he will remember is how he felt like he was entering a sort of sun-rimmed heaven, bound only by skin.
He spends days in her apartment, following her obediently as she takes him out for walks through the dirty downtown, and back again. He's never been this submissive; he accepts her brisk feedings of coffee and fruit and bread. Something carnal in him awakens at least twice a day and as she's about to leave the apartment he'll buckle her knees and take her on the floor. She's vicious and uses her nails as much as she can, without asking him whether or not it's his preference. It isn't, and he punishes her just as coolly, and they'll lie spent and sore or she'll crawl to the window-the whole apartment empty as a dirty white socket-and stare out like a child, smoking, pale and naked. One day it's raining and she's half-dangling out the window, and he finds he's been watching the rain flatten her hair like a wet cat, and gather in the shelves and nooks of gleaming shoulder-blades and vertebrae. Almost fond. He wakes up with a headache, a long blaring grey pain, and realizes she's taken a fistful of his hair and pulled.Natalie writes James a poem one day. She sets it down in front of him, scrawled in French on an envelope, and translates it for him.
The tea is cold, the egg half-gone, the
souring memory of honey
I suck and watch explosive green
Rotting in the rain
the porch wood, incredibly old
wait for it to cave inwards
wait for the kettle to boil, quiet
the apartment is vacant, and there are rats
cobwebs here and there
The magic of youth! Our cries of passion
send them springing up the wall
"Oh, Natalie," he says. He wants to fuck her again.
"I'll take you to Paris one day," she says. "You'll starve."
He laughs. "Thanks."
Her face is earnest, smiling, a thin-lipped shapely smile. "But you will. And you'll become a real artist too."
Two months pass like this.
It's an evening like any other and they're on the balcony, and he lights a cigarette. She rests her arms on the railing and looks up at him, grinning, and plucks it out of his fingers-quite unlike dream-Natalie, she smokes more than he does. He's too fascinated by the way she takes a drag to be irritated: she just tucks it in the corner of her mouth so she can grip her pointy elbows with both hands. Functional, angular, jaunty. She's naked. The setting sun lights up her eyelashes and half of her mane; the rest is cut off by the balcony jutting up above their heads. "Do you ever wear clothes?" he asks.
She pauses. "Not if I don't have to. It makes me feel like a little boy, you know? I can run down to a stream and swim right next to the little fishes. It's all just skin." Little said like lee-tle. "And it's such nice skin," he growls in her ear, feeling drawn, feeling hungry. She makes a fish face, giggling, then frowns a bit, feeling for his hand. "Is it? Hmm." She tilts her head to the sun and then asks shyly: "You aren't sick of it yet?" He shakes his head into her hair, looking down at the street and wondering at it. "No."
He doesn't comment further; he doesn't embarrass himself. "I was really a little boy, you know" he tells her instead.
"Vraiment, James?"
"Really and truly."
"C'est n'est pas juste. I had to be a little girl. Where is the fun in that? They made me wear foundation garments, James, and they forbade me things."
"Like what?"
"Slacks. Suitors. Dessert. My Maman, she was always making me reduce. Little Frenchwoman like me, she kept my Papa in line." A wistful smile; she finds his hand as slowly and gently as a lily pad may brush against the shore. She's fiddling with the tail end of some memory, all the colors shadow-fine, and he in turn remembers something that he hasn't thought about in years: puzzles. There were at least ten of them, done many times over with his mother on rainy days. What else was there to do in the country? They didn't even have a radio. When it rained the old house leaked; the entire east wing, a bathroom and two corners of the kitchen. His mother would discover soaked sofas in the days following a storm, and books curled up from the moisture, different inks running along each musty spine. To avoid the endless dripping into endless pots and pans they'd drag the puzzle boxes to the warm centre of the house, just the two of them, and dump them out, hunching on the floor for hours. He can almost smell them. Their perplexing flatness; oh, a memory of a thick green forest spread out in 1500 pieces, and when the rain would peter out the light would spill in through the high windows-childhood light, thick as honey-and pool on the living room floor, bright enough to coax them back into rustling, jewel-like translucence. He remembers turning the box over in his hands: Yosemite, July 1948. Yosemite Park exactly as it was in 1948, so bright it almost breathed, scattered around a picked-at peanut butter sandwich on a cowboy plate.
He thinks of building memories with this tough little Frenchwoman beside him; memories light and green like these ones, and powerful enough to curl up in his gut and make him weak. This thought terrifies him and she senses it, she senses a squirm of something like a fox, and asks him for what he is thinking.
Later, he finds her poem on a stack of paper and asks her for a title. "Your poem, there," he gestures at it as she strokes his back-they are touching, they are always touching-"what's it called?" She pauses, she smiles, she snakes a hand around his ribcage and it rests there, hot. "La Coeur," is what she says. It is a stupendous phrase, a marvelous sound he'll form again and again as he continues to live with her. Over wine, over whisky or gin he'll withdraw sometimes, into a wordless place. He's progressed along it all of his life, a scent trail and a haven, invisible and stuffed full; a place he can have his cowboy plate and puzzles, and whisper la coeur over and over. He hides there sometimes, fearful of the sound of his own voice like the white roots of a carrot must shrink from the sun. Natalie knows to stroke the green exposed lace, Natalie learns not to pull. She cups him, though; she cups him like water. He's hot with sunlight, with blood. La coeur. This phrase will draw him out, self-aware as he is sometimes, an ugly white root. She begins to know everything. The phrase is slick and hard as varnish but it purrs, a soft call for courage. La coeur, he wants to yell it, to cry it from a balcony at nighttime; beads of it reaching loving ears in the dark and sinking in like mercury.
With her encouragement he changes magazines, taking a measured risk, and it pays off. He gets to review new novels now. Most of them are horrible and she helps him write acidid reviews, they drink and laugh about the silly books together. He reads passages from the latest to her, on a fall afternoon in a park. The apples are swelling and the summer is dying, and he emphasizes the rickety sentences, allowing the inappropriately large words to tangle. "I have heard this word ardent maybe five times, and you have been reading for just as many minutes," she laughs. "All this reading may be helping my English but it is filling up my brain like a gutter." He skips ahead eagerly, there's a really good bit; a harlequin sex scene. He reads it with relish, pausing breathlessly between bosom heavings and sweet promisings and tingling oneness. "That was not sex," Natalie scoffs, as if cheated. "This writer is either a virgin or she is very, very old." She takes the book then, and flips to the back cover-and sure enough there is a face like a prune immersed in gingham, smiling tentatively out at them. "Both, perhaps," James suggests.
He grows more confident, his articles grow more scathing and he develops a following, much to his unabashed delight. He gets a raise, and then another, and with his newfound money he takes Natalie out for extravagant dinners. One place is much like the very first cafe they went to together-this is not lost on them-except the gown of the breathy singer has diamonds sewn into it, and the waiters, dressed neatly in crisp linen suits, bring them a fussy number of tiny silver spoons with their delicate appetizers. James notes that they're almost out of wine and refills her glass, watching her small movements in this evening's dress: red, it pulls here and there as she sips and bites and draws closer to listen, as thin in places as scarlet spider-web. Her eyes meet his, frankly and wordlessly, and she rests her utensils on the plate beside her half-finished pasta.
"You're so small, finish your food," he tells her, this ill-fitting protectiveness easing around him with each passing day. This sly little creature, he's easing himself into her web. "Small? I'll only grow out, not up," she tells him.
"Good," he says, "you could use a few pounds."
"You will be a good mother," she giggles, then squeezes his hand. He sips his wine. "This whole thing cost a fortune; meat and vegetables, practically. I just love it." He starts to elaborate, the women with their stiff bleached hair and long fake eyelashes, each table candlelit, the singer cooing At Last by Ella Fitzgerald and blinking into the stage lights, as fluffed and false as a stuffed peacock, and the chatter running under it, the laughter tuneless-he talks about it to her, wine-warm and incoherent, and she listens patiently, nodding. "It's the excitement, it's the money, everyone is together here in this room, forty or so, people just like us maybe, but they're rich for tonight, and they're thrilled as hell."
"This place, it's flashy," she nods. "It's loud, I know. But remember, it is also for the young." She's about to say something else, then pauses. "I think sometimes about all the things I wanted to do while I'm young. Do you know how old I am?"
He shakes his head simply. He'd never asked.
"You don't know, of course. Ours is not that sort of friendship." There is a pause, there is a shy sip of wine. "But I think that I want it to be."
He takes this all in very carefully, like counting a jar-full of change. In that way he registers his stomach drop a bit, and his pulse rising in his wrists.
"I know you want to know how old I am," she says, lifting her chin. "I know you want to know what month I have my birthday, and my star sign. I know I want to learn every part of you."
He gets up then. He walks halfway to another table, then turns and walks back, eliciting a sharp look from a woman in a yellow shift-dress. He sits and finishes his wine, he taps a fork against the pearly china of his plate. "At laaaast," moans the peacock-singer, and his eyes rest on Natalie's small and motionless wrists. He looks up at the rest of her almost distractedly, as if he's surprised she's still there, and then presses his thumbs into the softest flesh she has: the pale inside of her elbows. "I love you," he says.
In a perfumed rush the bill is paid, the complicated dessert forgotten and the silk tablecloth left askew, and they erupt into the night, their elated voices bouncing gently from the corners of it, off the lurking suggestion of streetlamps and trees. Before the outermost door of the apartment building has even swung shut they are kissing, and she grabs his face, nails and palm and fingers, and laces both hands in his hair, thrillingly cold. He lifts her and presses her body against the wall, one leg up on the staircase, almost tangled in her gauze-wrapped red dress and she parts from his mouth to form hot words by his ear, tumbling moist in the fleshy cup: "Did you mean it?"
He tilts his head, still lifting her, pressing against her breasts and her belly, and closes his eyes. "I do, God help me. Je t'adore."
She crows in delight and lets forth streams of half-words, drawn up on hot breaths as they sweat and he presses into her, brazen in the bright lit-hallway, half-visible from the street. "I'm twenty-four," she hisses as they find their way to bed, increasingly urgent. He grunts, pulling at her what remains of her dress, and she hits him, playfully, hard. "You pig, you don't care."
He mounts her and rips the dress upwards, kissing her thighs, gasping for air, and talking in quick, fragmented, urgent sentences. "You're twenty-four. I'm twenty-eight. I was born in April. April 17. 1937. Had my birthday before we met. All fucking alone. Think I had an extra tin of tuna to celebrate." She moans, urging him on. "I have a baby sister that I have never met. I fell in love with a boy when I was thirteen. I let him make love to me." James is up at her mouth again, her lips and teeth and decides to just leave the dress on, easing up inside of her. "I'm jealous of that boy," he admits, quietly, as she takes in her breath, catching it once like silk on a nail. "I like that you are jealous if it means you might stay," she says, even more softly, into his skin. If his ear hadn't been tilted towards her he would have missed it. He makes love to her then, better than last night, better than the boy she let inside at thirteen, and she cries out and then coos like a dove; like the brandy-soaked peacock they had watched a mere half hour before. He adds his own voice to it and she fits her fingers in his mouth as response. When they stop she runs her hand not over his back or his chest-la Coeur-but instead over the skin of his face, his cheekbones, the gentle flair of his nostrils and the proud thin lips. He closes his eyes obligingly so she can touch his eyelids too, and asks her what she's doing. "Memorizing your face," she whispers.
"Let me make it easier," he says, and brings her fingers to the inside of his lip. "Feel that?" She makes a tiny noise, an mmm. "That little bump's a scar from when I fell. Must've been ten."
"Why did you fall?" Her eyes, luminescent, sleepy, bored, lovely. Her mouth retracted to a near pout.
"I tripped over a rock or something. I think I was carrying a basket of strawberries."
"Where did you fall?"
"On the tennis courts of the old house."
"Tennis! In your backyard!"
"Barely; I never remember them looking anything close to tennis courts. Fulla big clumps of black leaves all the time, and with morning glory and grape vines all over the nets in the summer. My mother didn't play tennis, and my father must not have either, but I guess someone did. Maybe fifty years ago."
She shifts and props herself against a pillow. "And you still live there, non?"
He laughs. "Well. Not presently. But yeah, that's where I live when I'm not taking over the flats of nice young ladies."
She's quiet, as she is sometimes. "What a funny thing. One big house all of your life."
"It's rubbish, really. Great big thing painted maybe three colors all over, all peeling off. Gonna fall apart any day now."
Her eyes are wide, and he continues. "Not actually fall apart, but close."
She touches him again, draws him nearer. Take me with you, bring me along.
THIRTY-FIVE
There's a coarse lull in the doctor's office; aging people are lined up like kernels of wrinkled purple corn. Indian corn? Dried-up corn? James isn't sure. It's so hot they must be glued to their fake leather seats. He tries not to think of Natalie; he's tried all night to think of other things, to think of his teetering frightening scraps of half-novels and the house, oh, the filthy awful house-all havens to him now.
But she's come whispering over the rim of the instant hospital coffee. She's vibrating in the crumpled coat he drowsed on for three anxious hours; her scent and the color, alive in the bright green. Different nurses slink into the waiting room at uneven intervals, calling out last names. Morrison, Erskin, Renfrew. Renfrew is a bloated old lady with blow-dried hair, sitting in a wheelchair like a queen. Her feet swell up out of her sandals all red and puffed, inflamed like plucked sea urchins; stung. There is a trim little Filipino woman sitting by her who jumps to attention when the woman's name is called, and she says calming things to the old lady, calling her sweetheart and child. The chair nearly gets stuck in the narrow entranceway, and the trim little woman needs to pull out and try again, her face tensing up with careful effort and the old woman's head held high as if she is being carried on a throne.
James has been clinging to a bouquet for hours and hours. It's a skimpy few carnations in paper, and they've been wilting at an astounding speed. In all his selfish thirty-five years of living he knows he has never wished for anything more than this: his wife's salvation. He whispers her name under his breath for hours, Nat-a-lee Nat-a-lee like an incantation, as the old ladies sitting beside him send him worried, furtive looks under the rims of their straw beribboned hats and are replaced by sticky children or nervous stringy young women. Feminism is rampant now and some of them he mistakes for boys because of their shorn hair and baggy trousers. Most of them are pale and worried; something has gone off in their neat tight little packages of breasts and pert body parts-something is bad and growing. When he was twelve he wished for height but it is nothing like this; he wants Natalie whole again, strong again like he wants his mother back. This baby has ruined them.
A woman is standing above him now, and asking him for a word. He takes her in without even really being aware of it-short mousy hair and lumpy skin covered unevenly with powdery makeup of some sort. Green hospital outfit. Yes, he says, and his heart beats all the way down to his stomach, painful. He goes with her and asks where the doctor is, if he could speak to the doctor too.
She regards him, cooler. I am the doctor, she says, then softens as he balks and apologizes. It means she has bad news, doesn't it? They're trained to be kind. He's sick with something, his stomach is still pulsing in time with his heartbeat and churning up the sour hospital poison he's had over the past few days: rancid instant coffee, bags of peanuts and lifeless lettuce with spongy ham; the sort that look eager to revert to a previous grayish form even in the plastic wrapper. They sit; he's followed her into a room with chairs, a desk. An office. The light isn't as insistently white, it's filtered and real sunshine comes in through the white blinds. Dust bits from the carpet and the papers on the desk are dancing in it.
She tells him that he can visit Natalie soon. I need to prepare you first.
Leaning across the desk she touches his arm and speaks slowly.
"The baby didn't survive. The doctors did the best they could, but since it was extremely premature there wasn't much we could do. An infant that small just isn't prepared for oxygen and bacteria. She died peacefully in the neonatal intensive care unit a few hours ago."
She.
"And Natalie?"
"Your wife sustained severe trauma from the accident. She has a fractured clavicle, and she sustained severe bruising all along her pelvis. She's badly torn three tendons in her right knee, which means you'll be having to help her walk a lot more, maybe carry her groceries."
James wonders darkly if the doctor is a feminist. He has no idea what the clavicle is, but it sounds vaguely like a Medieval musical instrument-something it almost assuredly is not. He nods and grips his own knees. Now his heart is beating its way up his throat; thudding inside each of the little tracheal inlets he watches sometimes when he's brushing his teeth. She says Natalie can see him now, and asks if he's okay, to which he nods again. He had nursed a slow-boiling fury, a righteous anger at not knowing for so long; chewing little expensive packets of things and waiting, waiting, waiting as the old people sitting around him withered under the harsh lights and were diagnosed and carted out to be replaced by shell-shocked children, nursing ice-creams and reddish bandaged limbs. He'd broiled, festering frustration, but the words of this woman, delivered so lightly, render him inert. He's just about ready to curl up at her feet, like a cobra. "Lead me to her," he croaks.
White narrow hallway, white narrow hallway, sharp changes in direction like traveling along the inside of a skeleton. He tries to imagine bones big enough to wander in-whales, perhaps, hauled up from the sea-and then realizes with a disenchanted jolt that they're stuffed full of marrow, tons and tons of it.
Two nurses cling to them like seaweed and accompany James and the doctor into a room like all the others. And there she is. His Natalie. It's still her, the woman he saw get in the car, the woman he's held and passed onions to and fucked and bathed and stared at, the same woman he's watched get dressed in outfit after outfit after outfit, every hair of her is there, she's just pale and flattened in the sheets. He runs to her and halts at her bedside, wary of the big humming machine that displays her heartbeat. He itches to tear out the tubes inserted all over her body and taped in together like mosquitoes stuck to flypaper: they all look to be sucking her dry. His wife is a colorless leaf about to be released as the summer ages. She takes his hand with surprising strength and pulls him in, almost into the bed-his tough little Natalie-and they nearly make a mess of the wires.
There's a cast on her arm and a few bandages cover her breastbone awkwardly, the white tar-like touch of which he discovers as he kisses her all over with frantic chastened kisses. Could this be your clavicle? She touches it with careful fingers and he remembers being young and trying to punch himself, and not being able to. "This is broken, I think," she says, the French sharpening her 's' sounds, her voice as rich as ever. She could be cupping a tiny espresso mug in the Chestnut Cafe, she could be tapping out her cigarette. Her arm slides around him as it might slide across a table at a restaurant, conspiratory. "Hey, you look good," he grunts, and she laughs; the waiter has made a joke. "I smell like a pig," she tells him lightly. They pause and her hands, trailing those flattened lengthened leeches, press his hand against her belly.
"The baby's gone," she whispers. He grips both of her hands then, tighter than he should, and she leans into him as far as she can and he's nodding mutely against her, yes, gone, it's all he seems to be able to do these days. The nurses leave the room tactfully, trailing heartbreak and the scent of the flowers James has had with him for forty-eight hours and dropped at the doorway.
He doesn't remember how long he's been here, but she's been given something, some sort of painkiller maybe, and she's talking to him. She started out speaking in quick French that he couldn't follow, gesturing fervently with sweat clinging to the roots of her hair, but now she has slowed down and speaks English for him.
"I dream, you know."
"Do you. I guess there's not much else to do here other than nap."
"You think I am lazy, but it's not napping. The doctor gives me pills, I sleep for hours, I try to eat a meal that's on a little white tray in front of me. I wonder how long since it's been put here."
"You're a tough little lady, Natalie. You'll conquer this hospital and I'll take you home before you know it."
They'll go home, the two of them. Empty-bellied, empty-handed. Loss hangs frightening and heavy and sharp inside them, between them, like slackening icicles. He feels as if he's been crawling all over glass.
"Tell me what you dream."
"Je ne sais pas, cher. I don't know if I should tell you."
Natalie dreamed, before the nurse woke her with sludgy eggs, that she saw her old lover one night, when she was out at a restaurant with James. The eggs ran off her spoon as morphine vibrated in the blue veins of her hands, and she reme
Natalie dreamed, before the nurse woke her with sludgy eggs, that she saw her old lover one night, when she was out at a restaurant with James. The eggs ran off her spoon as morphine vibrated in the blue veins of her hands, and she remembered the details of her dream: the leaves were especially fragrant in the dark. She watched him drink himself silly, this old lover, and excused herself when he left on a crazy whim, following him through the warm night. The dirty stream ran cold, eerily bright like his skin: since she had him, he'd shaved his head. Dream-lucid, she watched his neck. Two thick muscles met like the hinge of a shell, and they flicked at the base of his skull as he turned. His eyes must have skittered over the trees. He was alert like a jaguar and she had wondered how his wife touches him. She remembered hoping that he's settled into mediocrity just like everyone else. She remembers thinking about James and wishing she hadn't worn that flashy sliver dress. Her heels hung in her hand.
She told herself that she was being selfish, she was being crazy, but it wasn't too late to turn around and go home, to go back to the big old house. Dream-time is thick and perilous, concrete and tar and silvery sand, but there was still time to go back home.
"I slept around a lot when I was in Paris," she tells James carefully now. Her hand is on her stomach.
"I know," James replies, carefully, lazily nonchalant.
"I slept with quite an old man once," she continues. "Luc Gaspard. Maybe more than twenty years older than you."
"Why are you telling me about him?"
"Luc was the sort of person you need to meet, James. He was old but very brave. This man, he reminded me of a knight born too late. He seemed....worn down to me, what is this word? Eroded. His skin is loose near his chin but he is lanky like younger men. You know what I am trying to say? Not stringy yet." She pauses. "This really is the second baby I have lost, James. Mon petit garcon est alle au Ciel il y a dix ans./"
"Oh, Natalie..."
"I remember so well this one time, close to when I came to Canada. There was a man, an awful man, I slept with him too, and now we're outside and it's too shiny-bright-out here, there's too many people. When we had slept together I was very drunk, and so was he, but it is morning. This man, this awful man, he won't give me back my clothes. /Etre silencieux/, James. Just listen to me and then tell me you still love me at the end of my story."
"Natalie, calm down. You don't have to tell me anything." But he's worried; he can't help it. Natalie is fierce as an injured bird; she possesses liquid strength, upended and tied down as she is.
"This man, James, he won't give me back my clothes. All I'm wearing is a little dress, the kind you sleep in. And the old man, the brave old fool throws himself in the fight. He was coming to see me, I think. He gets stabbed, James, twice, by the awful man. He falls."
"The man /killed/ him?"
"The awful man, yes, the man I made love to all drunk and stupid. I remember the scream in my chest, down here, I remember it wanting to explode out but it was too slow like those dreams I have been having here, those dreams you're stuck to the ground and you can't run. And the knife is still in his hand." /Look what you've done you cuntrag, you piece of shit, he says to Natalie, and she throws herself down beside the old man, so fast that her knees will be red when she gets up again. /
"Jesus," James holds her hand gently. "And the child..."
"Luc's and mine, /ma petit/," she whispers, her voice shrunken to that of a little girl's. The peppered lanky old man named Luc would bring her wine and he would take her out, but she never saw his house. He had the sort of pride that let you know he had beautiful children, and maybe a few paintings in his house that were expensive.
They nurse separate strands of grief then, entirely quiet. Natalie wants to be lifted from her pain and the wires and the tangled severed lives hanging from her, lifted from all that she's done and deposited elsewhere. A long primal yell reaches them from a few doors down. It is a horrible noise, wrenched from a throat as only a spasm of dark wet pain can. The ensuing silence feels doused, and they notice one after the other that night is falling.
/
/
*FORTY-SIX*
The backs of her legs are tensed and sweaty from the fight. The rock she's perched on is covered in tiny twigs and moss and soil, all of which prickle when she hunches to take her head in her hands. Anything is livable if you stay long enough. She could learn to love the feel of the rock and the sight of the blown-over ferns, stiff and giant, their undersides almost white. She could sit here forever and forget how to talk, and grow hungry enough to nibble on little purple clover and grass. She'd be cleansed. Alone. Free in the purest sense.
The percussive sound of crunching gravel reaches her over the birds. A small dark body is coming up the road, scarcely ten feet away and separated from Natalie only by a handful of slender birch trees. She watches this body in halting motion, obscured by bushes and then visible once more, and discerns that it is a girl. It must be that girl who comes around for James, Natalie thinks. She hunches even smaller, then yells hoarsely.
"Hey!"
The little body stops like deer, then bends to pick something up. Silence.
"You, girl!" Natalie tries again.
The head swivels and, through layers of leaves and shade, their eyes meet. "Hi," comes the voice of the girl. Deeper than Natalie expected.
There's a rustling now: the intruder is coming into the woods, curious. Natalie sits on her rock as straight as she can, mistress of the house. The girl stands before the birches, before Natalie, dark as shade and wearing the tightest jeans she's ever seen. She's not beautiful, but she's striking like that American singer Grace Jones is, and has the posture of an Egyptian queen. She looks at Natalie expectantly; slouching and clutching a notebook in her hand. She doesn't speak, and Natalie realizes quite suddenly that she hasn't thought past this point. It's a feeling comparable to coming up for air.
"Are you here to see James?" she demands.
The girl nods, brazenly. "You're Natalie."
A statement. They talk about her.
"I don't know who you are, I'm afraid," Natalie replies, airily.
The girl nods briskly; Natalie is forgiven for her ignorance. "I'm Mary. I'm a poet."
"And that's your poetry?" She points at the notebook in Mary's hand. Pink as calf's blood on a new white shirt and covered in little bodies; something Natalie can't make out without her glasses.
"Yeah, some of it." It's a big notebook, and Natalie is alarmed that someone so young could have written so much.
"James usually helps me with my work. He says I have potential." The girl speaks frankly. She isn't boasting, she isn't apologetic.
Natalie reaches out her hand and Mary hands her the book with a child's trust. The little bodies on the cover turn out to be cartoon ponies, cheerful and fat. She opens the book and then asks, "May I?"
There is a nod.
Natalie reads:
/Oh......./
/Inside, I feel fragile/
/Like I'm going to shatter into thousands of wet/
/Quivering /
/Butterflies,/
/Flying every which way.../
/Somewhere within my skin/
/I'm shrinking, I'm shriveling;/
/I'm melting like sugar through water,/
/But I can't let anyone know./
/So I tell them I'm cold/
/When I shiver and tremble;/
/And that I'm feverish /
/When I blush at your mention;/
/And when I gaze helplessly out the window,/
/Somewhere far away.../
/I can't speak./
Natalie thinks: /Horrible./
"Not bad," she manages. She looks again at the poem, and sees it is called /Love. /The girl doesn't smile; the girl doesn't frown. She takes the book back after a pause, then asks, "Are you French?"
"Yes," says Natalie.
"From France?"
"Why, yes! How could you tell?"
"It's how you speak. My aunt is from Marseilles."
Natalie thinks about this. "How old are you?" she asks.
"Thirteen and a half."
"Why, you're practically a woman, Mary."
"Yes."
"Mary?"
"Yes?"
"Do you like James?"
"Yeah."
"Do you love him?"
The child doesn't even blink. She sucks all of her mouth shut, like a anemone, and it takes nearly a minute. "I could," is her reply.
Natalie closes her eyes, but briefly; just long enough to register the rocks that have grown: one in the pit of her stomach, one in the base of her throat and one right in between her lungs, which she feels when she tries to breathe. Right across her heart. The question, fashioned to be facetious and even cruel, has come out of her with an unmistakable weight attached.
"You take care of him then, Mary."
"Are you going away?"
"I think so."
Mary watches the little woman get up then, and has a fleeting hope she barely registers to be that skinny when she reaches Natalie's age. Sinewy and perfect, hunched and weathered, the older woman makes her way through the underbrush to get back to the road. She doesn't pick her way; she just marches on through. Mary marvels. /She's not even looking down, what if she twists her ankle? /But she doesn't. She reaches the gravel unscathed and crunches, marches, back up to the house.
Mary sits on the rock then, her back as straight as Natalie's, and opens her notebook.
Natalie turns off the road and heads into the woods. Her grief is incomplete but it takes up her whole being: he is not dead but gone already, waiting for Mary and dinner and sleep. She keeps on walking, stepping over mossy logs, immersed in the forest. There are so many shades of green that she feels as if she is walking through a jar of sea glass: a clear mason jar set on a kitchen window, with the sun pouring through. Now more than ever she recognizes parts of these woods like bits of a story someone else has told; ah, this circle of granite stones. We skied past here in winter. She grieves the children that were wrenched from her, the little boys and girls that never progressed beyond trustingly absorbing all she took in for them, from lentils to cigarettes. She's leathery now, and they're curdled and forgotten. If she were to see him now she'd bury herself in him, /oh James, James. /She'd strike him too, she'd do her best to knock him out. Such rage; that the James she knew is buried within the graying body she woke up beside this morning, buzzing in its head like a fly in a lightbulb. Or far worse still, dormant; as dormant as the squirrel they found nested inside a bed of black leaves in their attic. Hibernating. The air was full of January static, and though she begged him not to James had lifted it out. It didn't stir; the tiny eye he pried open experimentally was terrifyingly blank. The lids had eased back together within a few seconds, but she'd never forgotten how vacant that little black eye had been. Dreamless sleep. There was no 'I', no conscious /being /in this creature, she'd thought as she'd slipped the limp thing back. All of a sudden a horrible though grows in her mind: her own 'I' died long ago; it'd become a 'we'. All of her stories involve him, they've done everything together. She can't go back to the tight little thing she was, and the alternatives are gray as porridge; as days and days of it. Ripped from him, from /we, us, /from who she has become she'll be scattered in pieces, and no better off than the squirrel. Shrunken. Doused. The years have sped on and they've both grown as passive and flaccid as fish skin.
She stops then, and stares. Through the trees she sees a giant mass of the purple clover that only appear in clumps here. It's as tall as she is, impossibly tall, and held up on a stalk so thick that it's almost as lined as oak bark. The leaves around her start to whisper together and it moves gently with the orange lilies it towers over, sweetening the breeze. She moves closer and sees that it's attracted dozens of fat bumblebees, all dipping towards the ruffled eastward faces of the flowers, reverent. It drains the fight from her and she feels like Moses, a dwarfed and breathless witness, as a cabbage butterfly alights at the summit, tattered and glorious, and folds wings as narrow as a perfect line of sand.
*
*
*FIFTY-NINE*
*
*
* *
She's saying that she doesn't know what to do, stripping off her coat carefully and self-consciously. Her words, her body in his doorway. The room is dark, everything a thick amber like the tequila on the shelf. James can anticipate her scent. When did the stakes get so high?
"I'll protect you, my darling. Now tell me you want me." A rustle, a gentle folding, a hard and delayed exhalation-she's afraid. Breathing in quick snatches as if stealing air from the surface; her chin tilted upward and proud even now. Treading water, twisting cloth. She's worrying bits of his threadbare shirt and whispering little things like excuses, flimsy as air bubbles.
The old man sleeps in the smoke-stale bed beside her, the sweat of his exertion long-dried on his skin and his face slack. She, Mary, is turned towards the window, watching. The sky is black and purple and grey, all thick and clumped. It could be because her eyes are bruised from lack of sleep, and it could be that morning is coming, at last. /I'm in such trouble, James, /she thinks, /I'm in such trouble and you couldn't give a shit less. /It isn't true, but it makes her cry.
"You're crying." James fumbles for her, his speech is slurred, but at least he's awake. She pulls away in a rare moment of petty resistance.
He doesn't insist; he lies back. "Tell me what you're thinking, love."
/Do you love me? /"I'm telling myself not to rely on you so much," she says softly, wiping her face. "It's hard."
He starts stroking her hair, like an afterthought. "It's so warm," he says. "The air actually smells like things, not metallic freezing shit that you breathe as quick as you can through your nose. I went for a walk tonight, before you came, and the trees smelled like trees."
She hears the little swishes and clicks, and smells the tart smoke. He's lit a cigarette. Outside, the courtyard is nearly black, but she remembers just where the washed-out, brown, ice-addled tufty ground yields crocuses, here and there.
"The ice has retreated in the courtyard," she says, "and uncovered a clump of orange peels that I'd noticed in November. They were still there."
"Free to rot once more," he says, pulling in smoke. "Me, I never stop."
She tries to knead the ache out of her eyes. It doesn't work. "Maybe you'd stop rotting if you wrote once in a while."
"I couldn't."
"Yeah, you're too busy smoking cigarettes and watching this place fall apart."
He put out his cigarette, undaunted. "I walked around in the tennis courts today. All the vines that were there in the summer are still all over the posts, they're just completely brown. It's like they were flash-fried. How about that?"
He watches Mary, the short-haired goddess across a spiraling garden of cracked tiles. She's at the front door, his back is to the kitchen door and he considers crossing the room and taking her again. She's near breaking, he can tell; she's shaking with the effort of rationalization and rubbing her thin wrists absent-mindedly. He wonders if her perfume still lingers there, or if he rubbed it off.
"You're more and more ravishing every day," he calls to her, deliberately turning his back as he walks into the kitchen for some more wine.
They're walking through the garden together. It's nighttime, and they don't speak.
His mind wanders and he can see her now, as her breath takes on brief form in the chilly black spring air, as swollen as the moon that saps them of color. He can see her strolling through the courtyard as summer ripens on clear nights like these, singing like a black swan, her head thrown back. "You'll be a wonderful mother," he tells her, brushing against her-and she grasps his crooked fingers, their bones warped from years of typewriters and women.
/I'm not a maiden, I'm not a vessel or a muse, and I won't be a mother,/ she thinks, and tells him: "I'm twenty-six, James."
He looks impatient; he wants to swat that statement like a fly. "What of it? You're a woman, just like fame or money; you've come to me during the pursuit, you're attracted to my creation. You wouldn't want me if I were languishing or stupid-"
"You might as well be, you've written about a paragraph a month-"
"-and you in turn create for me. /With/ me. Can't you be happy, Mary? Can't you see? I'm not asking you to marry me or cut off your head. I love you, I /want/ you-"
"Listen to me, James. Listen. I'm smarter than you think I am. Woman isn't a concept, it isn't a pretty little companion like your old canary. Woman is /me,/ with carnal desire and horrible darkness and...can't you see? I'm just a /girl/. You took me before I knew what I wanted."
"Oh? So tell me now, then, Mary: what is it you want?"
She throws up her hands and walks away; rubbing at the multitude of tight curls than span her scalp, then comes back. "I want my freedom, James! I want to not have to worry. I want so /much,/ and you won't acknowledge any of it." /Like hunger, /she thinks, but doesn't know how to say it.
"You want your freedom? Fuck some boys your age? That man you see sometimes? They won't care about you, Mary, they won't love you, they're fleas, they're infants!"
"You can't love me either, you can't love anything," she spits, though she knows it isn't true. In this twisted moment, in this close and crumpled night she believes it: he is nothing more than his vices and eccentricities.
He walks away now; she's incensed him. She tells herself /good, /she's glad; she imagines poisoning his coffee and aborting their child-the violet clump of mixed cells, pulsing with her evening meal and blood and sighing up again through her veins-but she doesn't leave, and her jagged thoughts smooth and erode as she moves through the gardens.
She finds him eventually by the lilac bushes, blossoming in the dark imperceptibly, and she sees with some near-revulsion that he's been crying. It makes him vulnerable and she can't stand vulnerability; it tightens her skin like the sound of nails on slate. He crouches and pretends to tend to the branches, plucking something invisible from the gossamer leaves, and she feels love tugging at her with firm and sticky fingers.
He fumbles in his pocket for his cigarettes and drops his matchbook. They both watch it lie in the dewy dark grass, embarrassed, and then she kneels and picks it up for him, and lights his cigarette.
"You'll kill me," he tells her, after exhaling slowly.
"I just want you to love me, that's all," she says softly. "I have freedom, I have everything I want."
He inhales, he speaks. "I love you."
"But not /really/. You're all loved out, you're a shadow. You know what I mean. I want you to love me like you loved...her."
/Her./
There's a long, pained silence. The little arguments, the little sore points, have all been a dance; little stinging steps around /this./
"I can't." His voice, tight and leathery and simple as cat gut, stretched out and dried in the sun.
"Then it went bad before it started, baby," she says gently. The first rock has been thrown.
A few days later. It's tentatively sunny for once, and he's scratching away with an old pen in his bedroom. The window is furred with dust, muting the sunlight and tinting his scrawled pages faintly sepia.
She's late. He knows it's because she's with /him/: that man she sees. /Jeffery, Gregory? /He pretends he doesn't know how serious they are. If he acts oblivious she'll play along too-a quality he's come to love.
The heavy front door sounds, somewhere down stairs and off to the right. Light footsteps and the whisper of a water faucet. He starts writing faster and neater; he sits up straighter and he is glad. Mary's here.
She opens the door slowly and, without even looking at him, pounces on the window and yanks it open. Dust explodes inwards like the seeds of autumn cattails and he winces at the white, blaring sun. "Good morning!" she sings.
"Morning," he says gruffly, and pointedly doesn't inhale when she hugs him. He doesn't want to smell the evidence of another man on her skin, clothes and hair. She senses this-this tension-and pulls away quickly.
"Have you eaten? Are you hungry?" He doesn't respond, and she won't press it and irritate him. She asks to read what he's written so far, and looks surprised when he hands a few pages to her.
She sits on the bed with her back half-turned, and he watches her ribcage and spine shift as she breathes and puts one page behind another slowly, crossing her legs at the ankle. She smiles as she reads, and he asks her which part made her smile-hungrily. He wants to replicate it if possible.
She shrugs. "The whole thing, I guess." He snorts in irritation, and she holds up a hand and tells him it's because it's so happy. "How do you do that? How is your work so vivid and celebratory? You're such a sour old coot most of the time. No offence."
"None taken," he assures her, and leans back in his chair. "I suppose we write what we want to know. We're exploratory. We dig strange channels into our selves and pull out evidence of other existences." He pauses, and then continues. "I've known incredibly happy people who wrote stories that'd make you slit your wrists." And think of Plath, with her delight in the curve of avocado pears and her head in the oven.
There is a pause. Mary opens her mouth and closes it. He waits, and she looks down at her hands, pulling the heavy sad pause taut.
"Gregory knows the baby isn't his," she starts slowly, with a little girl's voice. /Gregory, Gregory. /"I told him this morning." He gets up and walks over to her then, and kneels. He takes her young hands in his, knotted up with veins, and kisses them. "What do you want me to do?" he asks them gently.
He is pliable, now, and entirely aware of it. /I love him, I love him so much,/ Mary thinks, and thinks then of how flimsy that is, and how helpless she is to express it. She's run out of ways to show him how.
"I don't think I can see you any more," she continues softly as she watches him folded in half at her feet; shrunken as death. There's a shattering silence as her body begs her to stop. But she can't now. "I don't think I can see /him/ any more either." She draws rattling ragged breath; a wet red bag full of broken glass. He kisses her throat like a question, she pulls away. "I think I need to be alone."
"Why, darling, why?" His voice isn't even a whisper, and he can't look at her-his head lowers and finds its way to the comfort of her abdomen, and his eyes close on the cool crimson cloth. "Live with me, live with me /here/." My ruined kingdom, my skeleton-house, my bare courtyards. Live and blossom for me, out here in the sunlight. There is so much room and so little time.
She doesn't tell him why; they've both exhausted the why over the past few weeks. She holds him instead, and he holds her and after a while, she leaves. There are other words to be exchanged, later of course. She might even come back, for a while. Dozens of sour little knots open their shells within him, and tip their poison through.
Mary is free. She strolls through the courtyard, her head held high, and thinks about all the things she'll buy at the market. Mayonnaise, the white gloppiness of it against the cool glass and smooth blue label, and full heads of lettuce, one head, three heads, a whole cart-load of them. Spongy hot dog buns. Soap. Sunflowers seeds-or maybe a whole sunflower, so she'd never need to buy sunflower seeds again. But one sunflower looks so ragged and singled-out by itself-so perhaps a whole field of sunflowers too, a whole field knocking their heads together gently, somewhere blue-skied and balmy, with open, silent spaces for the wind to whistle through.
She thinks of all of this and keeps from crying. She thinks of all of this and presses against the gate.
Jennifer says:
If you are writing like this at twenty, you definitely have a future ahead of you as a writer. Your strengths are in your descriptions and the way you weave your words. I would caution against trying to be too literary, too soon, however. Don't fall into the trap of making all your characters worldly and bored. James and Mary and Natalie are all well-rounded characters that I should care about....but I don't; I just want to avoid them and their self-induced misery. Try cutting this story's length in half. I think you'll find you can still tell it well, and that its brevity will clear the cobwebs out of it.
Plot - 20
Characters - 22
Mechanics - 21
Enjoyment - 18
TOTAL - 81
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