She escaped from them both.
It is a festival of some kind. Mules with muddy bellies and legs; a young man with a bare chest leading one of the mules. He is laughing. His head falls back with drunken laughter, as if loose on his shoulders. Another man is riding a mule, slipping off into the mud, laughing. Garlands of flowers are woven in the manes of these mules. What is happening? Women run by . . . their shouts are hilarious, drunken. I see what it is—someone is being pulled in a wagon. The wagon’s railings are decorated with bruised white flowers, the man inside the wagon is speechless, his face dark with a look of terror, as if blood has settled heavily in his face and will never flow out again. Now a soldier appears on a black horse, the horse’s belly is splashed with mud. The leather of his complicated saddle creaks . . .
She woke suddenly. Her head pounded. The dream was still with her—the raucous laughter in the room with her, the whinnying of a horse. She looked around wildly, for a moment suspended of all personal existence, of thinking, not even afraid. The wagon’s wheels made a creaking noise and so perhaps it was the wheels, not the soldier’s gear, that was creaking . . . Then the dream faded and she felt only a dull, aching fear. For a while she lay unthinking in bed and felt the cool, contented length of her body beneath the covers, not thinking.
Twenty-nine years old, she had a sense of being much older, of being ageless. So many years of patience, the shaping of clay and stone, the necessity for patience had aged her magically; she was content in her age. Her work was heads. She was interested only in the human head. Out in the street she could not help but stare at the heads of strangers, at their unique, mysterious, miraculous shapes; sometimes their heads were a threat to her, unnerving her. She couldn’t explain. But most of the time she brought back to her work a sense of excitement, as if her blood, in flowing out at the instant of glimpsing some rare sight, had returned again to her heart exhilarated and blessed. She felt at times an almost uncontrollable excitement, and she would spend hours at her work, feverish, unaware of time.
She and her mother had breakfast together every morning. They ate in the dining room, enjoying its size, undiminished by its high ceiling. The house was very large, very old, a house meant to store collections—paintings, manuscripts, first editions, antiques. Her father, now dead, had collected things. The house had become a small museum, but polished and sprightly, ruled by her mother’s bustling efficiency. A woman with a firm place in local society, her days filled with luncheons and committee meetings and her weekends given over to en :ertaining or being entertained, Pauline’s mother was that kind of middle-aged, generous, busy woman who becomes impersonal around the middle of her life. She too collected things, antiques and jewels, and kept up what she thought t be an enthusiastic interest in “culture”; it was something to talk about with enthusiasm. “We’re stopping at the auction after lunch,” she told Pauline. She chattered at breakfast, her rich, rosy face ready for the day that would never disappoint her, being a complicated day filled with women like herself, the making out of checks, endless conversations . . .”You look a little pale. Are you well? Did you sleep well?”
“I had a strange dream, but I slept well. I’m fine.”
“I still think you should give up that job . . . I wish the weather would change. April is almost here and everything is still frozen, it depresses me when winter lasts so long . . .” she said vaguely. She wore a dark dress, she wore pearls and pearl earrings; a slightly heavy woman, yet with a curious, grace, a girlish flutter at the wrists and ankles which Pauline herself had never had. She was in the mold of her father: tall, lean, composed, with a patient cool kind of grace, never hurried. Pauline had never been able to accept the memory of her father in the hospital after his stroke, suddenly an elderly man trembling with tiny broken veins in his face . . .
RITES TO BE HELD FOR PROMINENT FINANCIER
PHILANTHROPIST
“Are you sure you’re well?” her mother said suddenly. “Yes. Please.”
They parted for the day. Pauline’s mother approved of her “work,” though she did not like her teaching down at the Art Institute; she feared the city. She did not exactly approve of Pauline’s clothes and her tendency to wear the same outfit day after day, but her daughter had a profession, a career, she was an artist, unlike the daughters of her friends. Every few years the newspapers did stories on her when she won some new award or had a new show for the art page or the splashy women’s page, the daughter of the late Francis Ressner, with large photographs that showed her standing beside one of her stark, white heads, her own head beautiful as a work of art. There was a certain stubbornness in both her and in her work. She had very light blond hair that fell past her shoulders, but she wore it braided around her head giving her a stiff, studied look; she had worn it like that since the age of fifteen. Her cheekbones were a little prominent because her face was too thin, but she attended to her face with some of the respect for clarity and precision that she applied to her work—though she wore no make-up, she kept her eyebrows plucked to a delicate, arched thinness, and she saw that her face was smoothed by oils and creams, protected against the city’s sooty wind. She was pleased to have a kind of beauty, pale and unemphatic; her father too had been a beautiful man. Her mother, florid and conversational, had been startlingly pretty until recent years, a perfumed and likable woman, but Pauline was another kind of woman altogether and pleased with herself. Sometimes, in the privacy of her studio, she sat on a stool before a mirror, her long legs stretched out before her, and contemplated herself as if contemplating a work of art. She could remain like this for an hour, without moving. It pleased her to be so complete; unlike other women she did not want to turn into anyone else.
That morning, entering the Institute, she saw one of her girl students talking to the man she had met the day before, Anthony—they were standing just inside the door, and both looked around at her. She smiled and said hello, not waiting for any reply. Her heart had jumped absurdly at the sight of him and she had no desire to hear his voice . . . she was afraid he would hurry after her, take hold of her arm . . . Safe in her class, she put on a shapeless, soiled smock. She directed eight students in their own work with clay. She was efficient with them, not friendly, not unfriendly, never called anything except Miss Ressner.
She felt no interest in her students’ lives, no jealousy for the girls with their engagement rings and wedding bands. The girl who had been talking with Anthony had long black nair and an annoying eagerness. She had a small, minimal talent, but she was one of those students who want to be told, at once, whether they will succeed or not, whether their talent is great enough to justify work, as if the future could be handed to them on a scroll, everything figured out by a superior mind, determined permanently . . . And she felt no interest in the men, who were both older and younger than she; their pretensions, their sincerity, their private, feverish plans did not interest her.
After class the girl said to her, “Miss Ressner, that man was asking about you. Out there. Did you notice him?”
Pauline showed no curiosity. “I saw you talking to someone.”
“He asked a lot of questions about you . . . I know him a little, not well, he hangs around down here in the bars and places . . .” Then, embarrassed, she said quickly, “But of course I didn’t tell him anything.”
Pauline felt tension rising in her. She dropped her paper cup into a wastebasket, conscious of spilling coffee in the basket, onto napkins . . . coarse paper napkins that soaked up the liquid at once . . . It was ugly, a mess. She went out into the drafty corridor. The dream was still with her . . . She was tempted suddenly to go over to the museum to see if anything there could explain it, surely it had an origin in something she had seen and forgotten. . . Why a procession of mules, why garlands of flowers, why a bare-chested victim in a wagon?
Later that day she saw Anthony again. He was standing in front of a restaurant, doing nothing, as if waiting for her . . . She had left her studio, restless, wan
ting to get away from students who dropped in to talk with her. She was too polite to discourage visits. Why did people waste her time talking to her? Why did they ask her vulgar, personal questions, about where she got her ideas, about whose work she admired most . . .? Why did people talk to one another, drawn together mysteriously, fatally, helpless to break the spell? She had sensed, in certain men and in a few women, a strange attraction for her—something she had never understood or encouraged. Gentle, withdrawing, but withdrawing permanently, she backed out of people’s lives, turning aside from offers of friendship, from urgency, intensity, the admiration of men who d not know her at all. She liked all these people well enough, she just did not want to be close to them. And now this Anthony, whom she would not have liked anyway, was hanging around her, a dragging tug at the corner of her eye, a threat. Her mother’s first command would be to call the police, but Pauline, being more sensible, knew that was not necessary.
It would have been a mistake to ignore him. She said, “Hello, how are you?” Her smile was guarded and narrow in the cold sunlight.
“Hello,” he said. His voice sounded uneven, as if he was so surprised by her attention that he could not control it. “Where are you going? Would you like some coffee?”
“I don’t have time,” she said, side-stepping him. She felt her face shape itself into a polite smile of dismissal. Anthony smiled back at her, mistaking the smile . . . or was he pretending to mistake it? Was he really very arrogant? She felt again a sense of fear, a suffocating pounding of her heart.
He rubbed his hands together suddenly, warmly, as if pleased by her. Today he looked more robust; he had shaved, his back curls fell more neatly down onto his collar; he wore a short, sporty coat that was imitation camel’s hair, only a little soiled; he wore leather boots, cracked and marred like her own shoes.
“I’d like to talk with you,” he said. “It’s very important.”
“Not today—”
“But I won’t hurt you. I only want to talk.” He smiled a dazzling smile at her—he was about to move toward her, about to take her arm again. She jumped back, frightened. But he only said, “I want to talk about different kinds of living, I want to know you . . . how it is for you, your life, a woman who looks like you . . . I spend my time watching things, or listening to things, music, in a bar or in somebody’s apartment, listening to records . . .”
“I have to leave,” she said thinly, bowing her head. She could not look up at him.
“Yesterday, when I saw you, I thought . . . I thought that I would like to meet you . . . Why does that offend you?”
She said nothing.
“I asked him, what’s-his-name, to introduce us. He didn’t want to. It was very important to me, something gave me a feeling about you, meeting you, I was very nervous . . . last night I couldn’t sleep . . .” She stared at his boots. Strong lines and faint lines, a pattern made by the salted ice in leather, ruining it. The pattern was interesting. One of her own shoes was coming apart . . . What if friends of her mother’s saw her standing here, on Second Avenue, talking to this man? His long, shabby curls, his striking face, the slouch of his shoulders and the urgent line of his leg, bent dancerlike from the hip, even the stupid cowboy boots, would upset and please them probably: looking like that, he must be an artist of some kind.
Stammering, embarrassed, she interrupted him, “I’m older than you think . . . I’m over thirty . . . I don’t have time to talk to you, I don’t go out with people, I’m not the way you think . . .”
“How do you know what I think?” he said angrily.
His anger frightened her. She was silent. Why was she here quarreling with a man she didn’t know? She never quarreled with anyone at all. She never quarreled.
“If you’re so anxious to leave, leave,” he said.
Released, she could not move. For a moment she had not even heard him.
“Don’t run—I won’t follow you!” he said angrily.
Back for her two-o’clock class, trying to control herself. She had another cup of coffee. Shaking inside. The coffee tasted bad. Everything down here was cheap, her students’ talent was cheap, common, their faces had no interest for her, she could not use them in her work, why was she pretending to need a job? She should quit. Move her studio out. There were only two genuinely talented students in her class, both men, and she guessed from their nervousness and the frequency with which they cut class that they would never achieve anything, they would disintegrate . . . other talented students of hers had appeared and disappeared over the years, where did they all end up? And yet when former students did come back to visit, most of them art teachers in high school, she was unable to show more than a perfunctory interest in their careers; why did people surround her, clamor into her ears, what did they want from her? What secret?
“He’s crazy,” she thought.
During the next several days, aware of him at a distance out on the street, she sometimes felt terror, sometimes a kind of dizzy, abandoned excitement. It was necessary for her to be afraid; she knew the police should be notified, barriers raised, bars put into place; yet she wondered idly why she should be afraid, why . . .? She could not believe that anything might happen to her. She was safe in her composure, her strength, she had been taking care of herself for years, and so why should she be afraid of that man, why could she even think about him . . .?
Getting into her car one afternoon, late, she saw him at the edge of the faculty parking lot, watching her. She was tempted to raise her hand casually in a greeting. Would, that dispel the danger or make it worse? She imagined him leaping over the low wire fence and galloping up to her . . . She did not wave. She did not give any sign of seeing him. But when she drove by him she saw him take several quick steps, faltering steps, after the car, in the street . . . his action was ludicrous, sad, crazy . . . She wondered if she herself had become a little crazy.
Bodies in a field. The field is sandy, a wasteland, but great spiky weeds grow in it, needing no water. The end of winter, not yet spring. The bodies come to life: a man and a woman. The woman has long, ratty hair, the man’s hair is mussed. It is confused with his face. Their bodies are twisted and their faces in shadow. They laugh loudly, waking, they embrace right on the sand, in the open field . . . Near them is something dead. Is it a dog or a large rat? Let it be a large rat. Frozen hard from winter. In the presence of that thing the man and woman embrace violently, tearing at each other’s skin, their laughter sharp and wild . . . They make love right there in the open, among the spiky weeds and the dead rat, aware of nothing around them.
She woke with a headache again, unable to remember what had wakened her. A dream? It was still dark. Only six o’clock. She got out of bed, her body suddenly aching. She dragged herself to her closet, put on a warm robe, stood in a kind of perplexed slouch, wondering what to do next . . . Her shoulders and thighs ached, her head ached. Her eyes in their sockets were raw and burning, as if someone had been sticking his thumbs in them. Nearby, on a handsome old table, was a head she had done recently, in white; the model had been an old man, but very clean, dignified. He had had a light fringe of hair, almost like frost, but she had dismissed that and the head was bald, an exacting skull. It interested her strangely. The head of an old man, a dignified shape of bone, interlocking bone. Ingenious work of art, the human skull. His forehead was solid, bony, broad. The nose was rather flat, but broad at the bridge; a strong nose. The eyes were stern, the eyebrows strong and clear, the mouth slightly surprised, but withdrawing ‘om surprise. She had wanted to convey a certain emotion—terror, really, but at the same time the refusal to accept this terror, even to allow the surface of the skin to register it. She ran her hand over the top of the head, over the face. Cold lead. Cold skin. She pressed her cheek against the top of the head. A completed work.
In her bathroom the light was too strong. It was reflected from the cream-colored porcelain of the skin. The house was old but the bathrooms and kitchen had been remodeled at
great expense; Pauline had never liked the change. She had liked the old-fashioned fixtures with their heavy, exaggerated handles, the mirror beginning to show lead beneath it—like the gray bones beneath a skull’s skin, without shame—and the old, creaky shower, the worn black and white tile. Now everything was new and clean, as if in a motel. It had no history.
She peered at herself in the mirror. In a few weeks she would be thirty years old, which seemed to her surprisingly young. Surely she had lived more than three decades . . .? Yet her face looked very young. It was pale, untouched, soft and baffled from sleep, as if with a child’s apprehension. What had she dreamed? She took a jar of night cream out of the cabinet and smoothed it onto her face. It was necessary to lubricate her skin, she had to take care of herself. It was a duty. One day, twenty years ago, her father had told her bluntly that she was dirty—disheveled hair, socks running down into her shoes. “I don’t want you to look ugly,” he had said. It was a command she took seriously, because she had his face, a striking, beautiful face, and that face brought with it a certain responsibility. There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty.
Skin is an organ of the body. It consists of many layers of cells. No one could have invented it. Cells absorb moisture and lose moisture; they pulsate in their own secret rhythm, in their own private time. Invisible, elastic. Each human being has his own skin, unique to him. It is a mystery. Someday a dead woman will wear the skin that belonged to a living woman, and it is the same skin exactly. Then it decomposes . . . The skin is the most impermeable barrier of the body. It is always thirsty. Its thirst is insatiable. Human thirsts are satisfied from time to time, but the thirst of the human skin is never satisfied so long as it lives.
She wandered aimlessly through the house. Downstairs, she looked out the window down the slope of their long front lawn, at car lights on the avenue, a distance away. Where were all those people going? It surprised her to see the cars out there, people driving all night, into the dawn, with secret, private destinations . . . Something moved out on the lawn. She did not look at it. Then, feeling helpless, she looked at it . . . she saw nothing, only shadow . . . it was not possible that anything had been there.
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