Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  Rafael Was Morose

  In spite of the text, he was lacking words. He had been doing a series of mostly white paintings, and so shades of it bloomed on his clothes, on the toes of his leather boots. His current obsession was, I think, an unconscious attempt to whitewash, to cover up the murkiness of his love life, the other thing that preoccupied him and which he couldn’t mention. It hovered around him, forlorn and wanting expression. There was a splotch of paint on one side of his chest that resembled a bird. The top of one wing beat above his heart. He scrubbed his chin as he was thinking, which he didn’t realize he was doing. From the outside it would appear as if we were having a conversation about the twins’ school, about an upcoming performance in which Stella and Augustin were pirates, one good and one bad, which was causing a kind of identity crisis, but this was only a surreal film and we waited for the spider to finish its sentence. He scratched at his scalp and looked concerned.

  “I don’t,” he said, and then he looked at me. We communicate sometimes in the manner of the twins—they have taught us. I know what he referred to, that he was giving me the depleted line: I don’t love her. Encapsulated in his denial was an offering, but it was only air. I had already rejected it before the full stop. A white jellyfish on the thigh of his navy pants seemed to undulate. Tentacles traced down the leg and around the knee. He is clumsy.

  He turned and walked into his studio down the hall and I followed him. He was talking about the twins again, laughing when he wondered if Stella and Augustin negate each other. Against the far wall, perhaps a dozen paintings leaned. Drawings were pinned to a wire that stretched across one side of the room. The wing on his heart tapped against him as he moved around the room, looking for something. The looking was a pretext, as he wanted something else. Desire is our greatest invention. He squared his back to me, his fingers flipping through a box of supplies on one of his tables, and cleared his throat.

  The problem of his current work, these white paintings that were not really white—they were, if you looked close enough, containers of blues and yellows and violets. The more you looked, the more colourful they became. Which was a beautiful effect, but they weren’t aligned with him yet, and I hadn’t told him so, because I was waiting for the right moment.

  “I wonder if,” he said. “No, never mind.” He pulled out one of his notebooks. It was stuffed with photos, and some of the pages were wrinkled because he used paint or graphite or glued in various bits of found images to create new collages, so that the whole thing swelled like it had fallen in water, and the spine creaked when he opened it.

  “I have to … ,” he said. He rummaged. “Stella said something to me the other day.” A paper spilled to the floor, though he ignored it. He looked over the top of his glasses at me. “Who is this man who is missing? Are you planning on telling me?”

  I watched him for a moment, the sudden poise of his old face and the irony drifting about unsure of where to land. I said, “Are you planning on telling me?” and a little smile escaped, because, really, I wanted to laugh.

  He put the notebook back on the table and then walked toward me, taking off his glasses and putting them in his shirt pocket. When he reached me, I felt the wave of heat from him. The body is radical in its honesty. It admits to its ideas, regardless of intent. It has a thing for territories, for areas it wishes to surrender or to reclaim. It has a thing for symbolism. His expression was dark, confident.

  “Let’s fuck,” he said. Sex was the exit, the way out of whatever loomed. I leaned back against a table, and with one hand behind me I shoved the drawings lying on top of it, letting them fall.

  Vanishing

  This had seemed so reasonable only moments ago.

  Let me reduce sex to a theory. Drain the fun and guts of it.

  Convey that I wanted to flee, where only a minute earlier I had been his completely. This is a trick of the body—it convinced me, again and again, that I would locate something long gone or out of reach or never there to begin with. Its mystery could be understood if I turned my body over to our bartering, which swung on the idea of wholeness, and that Seth was the completing force. These were not casual encounters, my much-preferred mode. Whatever we were about to do, whatever the degradation to either one of us or loss of self or negation, it hardly mattered as the acts themselves became the conduit we needed to locate that missing item: the other us.

  And then, the aftermath, the collapse of the system.

  I pulled the covers around me, as if I were a modest person, but I did this to keep my hands busy. I didn’t want to show him how quickly I had cooled, that I could barely touch him. I knew if I spoke, my voice would contain none of the huskiness and warmth that it had only moments before. I was already constructing my to-do lists, already working on a piece, and realizing that Sosha’s entrance was too early and that a duo would be better off deconstructed, perhaps done away with. I ticked off the seconds in my head, calculating when I could get up without alerting him to my sudden indifference or even aversion. We were a thing I had to leave, but I had to carefully stall the desire to bolt and vanish in increments.

  I slid to the bathroom.

  I came out with a towel around my waist.

  I listened to him talking while I pulled on my shirt, my pants.

  By the time he was finished speaking I was fully dressed, with my earrings and watch located and now in place and my jacket over my arm. He looked at me with a haze of astonishment, but he was so sleepy, he decided, and lay on the bed again while I headed for the door.

  White Space

  I went into Raf’s studio when he wasn’t there. Not to rummage for the traces or cast about. I’m not so petty. The question of why, for instance, rising electrically from the dark, was more interesting to me than the lover. She was only a condition that arises and fades. It was the why I wanted to keep. Its light was like an animal at the ocean floor learning to gleam with the silence. The way it appeared and sank back under, seeking its depth and pulling me with it.

  I looked at the north wall of the studio where three paintings hung side by side, all in the mode of the white grids. The dark lines were sharp and thin and regimented, with the exception of a few places where the colour had bled into the white field. The lines were actually indigo. I realized suddenly as I stood there, my bare feet on the paint-stained floor, that envy shrouded my heart. I was jealous of the lines. Or rather, that he could make them. That his art allowed for the razor-like transmission of an idea. The line, untouched by other forces, could be a line, a straight cut. That whatever imprecision might be there at a smaller level wasn’t noticed by the human eye.

  Nothing I could do with my body or with the bodies of my dancers could approach the discreteness of the indigo lines. I have to rely on sets and backdrops, columns and polygons. Painted structures that are unsparing in their crispness and appear even sharper against the vulnerability of the bodies. The human form, born in entropy, defies the straight and tends toward bowing and folding. An unending expression of variance.

  The lines of Raf’s paintings were made by someone who is himself rumpled. He veers drunkenly when he walks, even when sober. He is held up by walls or the backs of chairs when he stands. His hair flops into his gaze, and his clothes and limbs are fluid. His abdomen swells a little over his belt. Clouds of smoke or scents or the density of his feelings drift around him. He appears tangible at the same time as dispersed, like a red wine stain on a white carpet, or a traffic accident. This is the man who, using whatever painstaking method, applied the lines to his canvases with the same insistence of the people who made the city’s grids. A studied and careful violence over natural forms.

  Soft light entered the west-facing windows. The particles bounced on the white paintings, reams of paper and canvas rolls, white walls. His knapsack was moody where it slouched on the floor, just underneath one of his worktables. I resisted the urge to touch it, but then gave in, and held it in my hands, before opening it. My fingers felt down one side
of the interior and then another until they found a gauze fabric and I pulled out a rolled-up scarf. I let it unravel to the floor. Abstracted shapes of apricot and ochre and a few splotches of dark green. I rolled it again, placed it inside the knapsack, returned the knapsack to its place under the table.

  Beside the knapsack, buckets were arranged, most of them empty. But one held the white paint that Raf was mixing for a large piece and which he planned to transport to Queens. Perhaps he had abandoned the attempt, as the paint was thickening in the bucket. He didn’t care about waste.

  I took a large flat brush, about four inches wide, from his worktable and stuck the tip tentatively into the paint. Stirred gently. I liked the thickness very much, how opaque and plaster-like it was, how viscous. I pulled the brush out, holding it over the bucket so the paint slowly oozed and dropped. Then I picked up the bucket’s handle and carried it with the brush over to the three paintings on the wall, setting the bucket on the floor. The shade of white it contained could be called obliterating. I loaded the brush with paint and decided where to begin, settling on the painting on the far right. Moving from right to left seemed apt, like backspacing. I touched the brush to the surface and felt the bristles gently bend and curve as they deposited the paint. Then dipped the brush again, and again, continuing to paint until all three panels were well covered and those impossibly straight lines were gone.

  Emptiness

  It’s possible I hated Seth with a purity so annihilating that I studied his face to practice restraint to not claw or slap it. I remember wanting to commit it to memory, but then I think this isn’t true. I studied it to forget it, obliterate it. I looked closely enough that all of its details could blur and a void could form with one last hiss of dispersing energy.

  * * *

  On the other hand, this was the face that I had kissed innumerable times. I had seen every possible expression cross it, including this one of distance, as if we watched each other on crackling video monitors. But I saw the stain across his cheek, the wrinkles around his eyes, the grey hair that still surprised me. Impossible to render the details without the mundanity of exactly these things, but the commonplace is what strikes me now as memorable and even desirable. The face I see in my mind is a face I would like to touch again.

  Once You Know the Name of a Place, You Are No Longer There

  A brook, called the Minetta, used to flow past the park. Before it was buried. People still say that it lives, in some sense, underground, and that construction digs down to the appearance of clear water. But the ground where I am is not a permeable thing. It doesn’t allow. I want to sink into it, however, if these people would let me go.

  There is a silver-haired woman about ten feet away, with clip-on pearl earrings and a snakeskin clutch. She watches me, thinking how much younger I am than she is, that she should be the one disappearing, except that she has no intention of doing so. The city isn’t done with her, she theorizes, or the winter day, which will turn bright eventually. The park will erupt, three months from now, into blooms and leaves—and the haunting, dark branches of the catalpas will be covered. She will be here to see spring, and she says this with her body, how she stands apart from the people touching me and watches. She thinks about the sight in front of her, this roiling mass, but she also pictures coming in her front door, a grocery bag in her arms.

  Her eyes narrow at my body; she recognizes a circumstance that could belong to her—a stroke maybe or just a slip on the ice. “Such a pity.” She begins to recognize me, and knows she’s seen me either on the street, because she belongs to this neighbourhood, or elsewhere.

  * * *

  Elsewhere. A lovely word—ethereal, nebulous. I have misplaced you, and you are elsewhere. I have lost the thread, the trail. You vanish, or I do.

  Clothing

  Dr. Lucia Chen said, “Looking satisfied is another form of armour.”

  We were sitting in her Harlem office, and she was more forthcoming than usual. I had made the observation that the city had its effects on people; their souls, too, maybe. Polar ideologies showed up in the face. The yin-yang of this existence. But hustling was a form of armour, and the wearing of black clothes. So, too, looking satisfied, apparently.

  “Not you, of course. I mean people generally,” she said.

  “That’s a relief.”

  Whatever the effect of having countless patients pour their big and small tragedies into her ears, however, it didn’t show up on her face. She was the glistening exception. She didn’t have the purplish swatches under the eyes, the defiant glint in the irises, the set lips of the urbanite. Her back wasn’t as straight, though, as you might imagine for someone practiced in meditation, as she had a tendency to slouch or curl herself into the large armchair, almost as if she would sleep if you’d only shut up. She wore clogs or sometimes sneakers in too-bright orange or pink; sometimes she kicked them off and tucked her feet under, and the sneakers lay askew on the floor.

  “Are you going to explore that?” I said. I pointed to the whiteboard she kept close by, and which she used to write topics or aphorisms, or sometimes she made intricate diagrams of one’s issues, balloons and squares and stick figures in mystifying combinations, which by the end of session possessed utter clarity. But all she had written on today’s board was

  ALL STRUCTURES ARE UNSTABLE.

  “Self-evident,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She said nothing, which was one of her tools. Eventually the space was big enough that you’d fall into it.

  “You want me to continue where we left off,” I said. “But I’m still recovering from last week’s whiteboard.”

  “What did it say?”

  “You don’t keep a record?”

  “No,” she said. “Why would I do that?”

  “ ‘The problem of absence is the supposition of error.’ ”

  “That’s a good one,” she said, shutting her eyes. Then she opened them again. “Did it help?”

  “I guess. You want me to get used to it. Accept.”

  She brightened. “Sooner or later. But better sooner.”

  I sighed and examined my hands.

  “How about I say something not popular thinking here in the West?” she said. “Ready for it?”

  “Sure.”

  “There is grace in looking at suffering. Really looking at it.”

  Neither of us spoke for several minutes. Finally, she said, “No, I’m going to say two things that are unpopular to the Western mind.”

  I waited.

  “Look death in the face.”

  “Okay. Except you yourself said that death isn’t a concrete thing. Only an idea. So, there’s no face to look into.”

  “Nice try.” She laughed. “Death is friendlier than you think! Face or no face. You know what the Dalai Lama says about death?”

  “What?” I smiled. I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I’m paraphrasing but, Change your clothes. That’s all it is. You change your clothes.” She shrugged.

  Sidewalk

  But the boy startles. I have frightened him again. He had lost his fear; he was curious instead, and now—

  * * *

  Seven minutes will pass, is passing, have passed. Pull apart the word minute and you have the sixtieth part of an hour. Also something chopped small, of very small size. Something lessened, diminished. Think of a diminishing note on a piano, which won’t be held or sustained or kept. The dissipation is essential and can’t be helped. You can only play another note. Seven of them, maybe. Look up seven and it will say, absurdly, six plus one, but you won’t be able to argue. The tautology won’t end. The only way forward is forward.

  * * *

  And now. What minute are we in? The seconds contain multitudes. I am lost in them. The boy shivers.

  The Cause Is Unknown

  One of her favourite buildings is the ten-storey, neo-Renaissance one that sits close by. It shows only subtle signs of its history, and is now owned by the uni
versity. She favours it, not for its secrets but in spite of them; if she can find love for the tan and terra-cotta exterior, the smallish size of the building, perhaps she can also forgive that it holds somewhere in its framework the memory of a fire. Unknown by most people who pass on the sidewalk, the anniversary is marked each year with a memorial. The city absorbs its histories to such an extent that they can become invisible. She wonders what happens to the knowledge, how it is hoarded.

  Molly

  The papers read: Cause Unknown. Whether my father was the one to start the fire that night or whether the boxes simply became tinder for some other spark is unofficial. Either way, the bottle of his nameless rage, the problems he couldn’t configure, and the expression of my parents’ ideas, their desires and fears and sacrifices to the gods of worry, were compacted into ash with little left to distinguish the parts. Their stockpiling was a form of prayer. They provided fuel for the monster that turned up and confirmed himself to be a bad guest. They fed him, and then he ate them, too.

  Cajal

  No one notices the cane’s print in the snow. Naturally enough, the people see the body having a seizure. Possession and a bad angle.

  The Lover, who had felt repulsed and whose mistress is currently two blocks away making, perhaps, linguine with a white wine sauce and checking her lipstick in a spoon’s reflection, moves from the left side of me to the right. He stops in his new position and places his hand, unconsciously, over his heart. He was an inelegant man who is suddenly elegant, the precision and gentleness in the placement of his fingers a single movement that would take some people many hours—or perhaps years—of practice to attain. The thought radiates from him, I’m so sorry this is happening to you. He will tell his lover about this, about what happened on his way to meet her, and he will hold her close, breathing into her hair.