by Sandi Tan
Raymond cherished the colorful stacks of toilet reading that showed up at his door near the end of each year. It was marvelous how marketers located his home address and worked out his weaknesses—monogrammed linen stationery, shawl-collar cashmere robes and an endless onslaught of shearling slides and alpaca scarves. The art museum catalogs had modernist scarves from Japan that looked like ghost scarves, the ethereal remains of silk scarves that had died and gone to scarf heaven. And fleece everything—how he loved the smiling sound of “fleece.”
He was especially grateful for the catalogs this year because they distracted him from a particular MoMA greeting card that had arrived that afternoon, a minimalist black triangle standing in for a Christmas tree. It was signed: You Know Who.
Who the hell was You Know Who?
Dear RvdH,
You know what.
You know why.
You know when.
X,
You Know Who
Raymond stared at the black triangle. He inverted it. Now it was some modernist pubis, like Miro’s version of what that naked girl slapped against his window.
He banished the card and photo to the corner of the living room where his grotesque Pop art monographs lived. He had his father’s winter blues. As repellent as it was to him to face up to the sly workings of DNA, this fact sealed their connection. He had for years spent December and January indoors, in a flannel robe thrown over silk pajamas. Every man in their family handed his melancholy down like some pauper’s heirloom. The blues was his link to his cousin, Gus, who sat in a Sioux City jail for shooting a co-worker in the ass when he misplaced his lunch pail; it linked him also to his paternal grandfather, a lapsed Klansman, who on his deathbed had requested sex with “Hebrew Sally,” a girl from his youth. He had the blues in his blood. While researching one of his books, he’d come across a reference to the blues in the Getica, the sixth-century text that chronicled the diaspora of the Gothic tribes. The author, Jordanes, wrote that on the isle of Scandza, or what would become modern Scandinavia, people went through a schizoid cycle of joy and sorrow with the continual light of midsummer and the interminable darkness of winter, and were “like no other race in their sufferings and blessings.” His winter blues was not a faddish new ailment, like ADD, carpal tunnel or Tourette’s. Why fight history?
He drank his Scotch and picked up The Waning of the Middle Ages, which was gathering dust on the coffee table. He’d underlined a passage years ago about how everybody in the Middle Ages was perpetually high-strung: So violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.
And where was his houseghost during this time of need? He’d disengaged his alarm system specially for her. But no, she was spurning him. What did he have to do to bring her back? Beg? Cry? Strip? He’d do all three.
“I’m vulnerable right now,” he bellowed into the emptiness. “Come get me!” The ice-maker rumbled and plopped out some consolatory frozen phalanxes.
He undressed and lay supine on the sofa. He clicked on the remote and found the show called Desperate Housewives, which the critics said used to be funny, or good, or popular—he couldn’t remember which—and fell asleep.
Quellie Soo had been showing up often, and the girls heard her anxiously repeat the word staging as a noun, which repulsed them. One morning, a furniture rental truck dropped off two antique side tables, three frilly lamps and a bordello-style chaise lounge with red chenille fabric. Quellie and Mrs. Park spent the day dragging these pieces of alien furniture around the house until every room felt strange.
“Quellie Soo says staging is like making theater,” Mrs. Park said to the girls at dinner, whether they were listening or not. “Realtor is producer, owner is director, children is actor. We make our house the dream of buyer. We stage open house on day after Christmas. Sale can be very fast, Quellie say. Very few houses in California, very many buyer. If buyer ask for one-week escrow, we must say yes, believe you me.”
Rosemary frowned. “So, we could effectively be thrown out of our own house by New Year’s? It’s December seventh! Where will we stay?”
“No worry,” Mrs. Park stated calmly. “I already book airplane ticket.”
Mira backed her chair away from the table noisily and slid off it like a jellyfish.
“Mira, where you go?”
“Leave me alone. I need to pray.”
Her room had been transformed into some deranged Martian’s idea of what a girl’s room should look like, but the makeover had been half-assed. Plastic wrap covered two cheesy framed prints of butterflies to be unveiled at some future occasion, and stuffed animals neglected for a decade were given pride of place on her shelf alongside her books about unsolved murders, UFOs and poltergeists. On Quellie Soo’s genius advice, her mother had hired an old Korean couple to paint the bedroom walls a peachy pink to match the new Martha Stewart Kmart quilt that would grace her bed during the open house. Her old sheets were still on her bed, faded blue Care Bears marching across the mattress, goodwill shooting off their bellies. There was a brown stain from one of her periods that had never washed off, and the way it blotted Daydream Bear’s head made him look like the victim of a maniac’s sledgehammer. She’d always liked that about it.
She retrieved a shoebox from under her bed and took out all the little religious icons she’d been collecting. She mounted them on her night table: a rubber Buddha, a wind-up Moses with a bowlegged stride, a family of genderless Peruvian worry dolls, a garish clay Hindu Ganesha, Rosemary’s Jesus nightlight, the milk-chocolate dreidel her classmate Ruth gave her back in third grade, and a series of laminated prayer cards featuring Catholic saints in action poses, sometimes leaking blood. These cards she cherished the most, and she blew kisses at each one.
Some mornings, instead of taking the bus to school, she would ride in the opposite direction to downtown LA, hopping off at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels perched atop Bunker Hill. She felt comforted by the cathedral’s egalitarian, Southern Californian approach to worship—Catholicism with all its dark cavities filled in and sanded out, designed to welcome the stampeding population of twenty-first-century Los Angeles with its head-spinning diversity of casual footwear. It was light and airy, yet sturdy, a terracotta mesa with such clean lines that it came closer to a modern art museum than a place you went to contemplate your failings. The wooden benches for congregants even came with butt grooves. But Mira’s single favorite thing there wasn’t the enormous tapestry with its multi-ethnic kids in sneakers marching in solidarity behind Boniface and Mother Teresa, nor the chipper tablet in the mausoleum dedicated to “Beloved Dad” from his “Little Buckaroos.” Her favorite thing was the gift shop, which sold a dazzling array of knickknacks and keepsakes, from biblical-themed nail files to statuettes of US Marines with guardian angels looking over their shoulders, sized to sit atop TVs. It was there that she began her collection of sixty-five-cent prayer cards, purchased one at a time like ecumenical trading cards. The twenty she’d amassed were the pride of her shrine, glued to the inner walls of the shoebox like stained-glass panels. There was one of Lazarus, stray pups sniffing at his toes, another of some lady holding up a washcloth embossed with Jesus’s placid visage (“the Holy Face”), but her dearest was the one of a New World saint—Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, a blessed virgin who, on the card at least, resembled Rosemary to a tee.
In the dark, Mira lit up a semicircle of tea lights. After placing the shoebox chapel behind the menagerie of deities, she opened her palms:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Rosemary pedaled hard. Two weeks with no practice left her winded as she rode up the hill. The body forgot things, got dumb. Every step became an education all over again. Even the seat felt bizarrely foreign, as if molde
d under someone else’s butt. She was a block from Mr. Z’s house when she realized it was Mira’s lousy old bike that she’d been riding. How could she not have noticed the spastic tassels sprouting from the handlebars? Why was it so freaking dark out tonight?
When she came to the blue cottage at the top of Mount Curve, she dialed Mr. Z on her cell. He took forever to pick up. Three rings, four . . . The curtains were drawn and she couldn’t see a thing. Warm lamplight upstairs and downstairs. In one upstairs window, an erratic flicker—somebody was watching TV. Five rings. Two cars were in the drive, neither of them his but he’d probably parked the Nissan inside the garage, given how fastidious he was about his things. The stupid bull fucking terrier swaggered outside the front door, tethered, watching her. Six. Just when she thought his voicemail prompt would trigger, he answered, his voice crushed and slurry, like he’d been asleep.
“What’s up?”
“Do you have time to talk?”
“It’s really kind of late, you know.”
“I’m outside.”
“What?”
“I’m standing outside your house. Right now.”
She waited for him to look out. Maybe wave. Not even a flutter in the curtains.
“You’re on Mount Curve?”
“Yeah. I really need to talk to you.”
“You know it’s not possible . . .”
Rosemary waited for him to state a reason.
Instead: “Can I call you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? But I’m right outside your house now.” She waited. “Please, I won’t take much of your time.”
She heard him sigh. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said something to somebody, probably his wife. Footsteps, a door opening and closing. When he came back, his voice was even quieter: “Listen. Go home. I’ll call you in a while.”
“You promise?”
“You know, really, you’re being a little . . .” He sighed again. “Yes. I promise.”
She stood in the dark for another five minutes after hanging up, waiting to see if Mr. Z would finally peek out of the window. Or if his Indian wife would step into the path of some light and have her silhouette cast against the drapes. Nothing. A patrol car cruised by, its headlights momentarily blinding her. It slowed but didn’t stop and she heard the Christmas carol about the Little Drummer Boy drifting out its open window. Pa-rum-pum pum-pum. She got back on the bicycle and noticed for the first time that Mira had attached a reflective sign at the back of the seat: don’t like my driving? call 1-800-eat-shit.
As soon as she cycled away, the demon dog in the yard started yelping like a crazed lover who missed her and wanted her back in his life right now.
When she got home, Arik was in her room. He sat on her bed, wearing only underwear.
Not an apparition. The window, he got in through the window.
She kept the lights out. The darkness took from them the terror of eye contact.
“I miss being inside of you, Rose.”
She kept quiet.
“I really need you, Rose. You know? And I was wondering, even if you needed time to forgive me . . . if, during this time, we could still, like, fuck anyway?”
She could smell his garlic-bread breath.
“Say something, Rose. I get hard just thinking about you.” He grabbed her hand firmly and brought it to his groin. His erection pierced through the opening in his boxers.
She recoiled just as her fingers felt the goop at the tip of his cock. In the dark, she might as well have touched the tongue of a cow or a manatee.
“Rose? Say something.”
She snapped. “I actually find you pretty gross right now. Sleeping with you is the last thing on my mind.”
“You’re lying. You don’t have to lie. I know you still love me.”
“Are you insane? I don’t love you!”
“I’ll do anything for you. I didn’t mean to dump you like that . . .”
“Jesus fucking Christ! You didn’t fucking dump me!” She wanted to scream, but kept her voice down. “You’re the one who’s so fucking needy. Mr. Z was so right about you . . . Do you know what he called you? He called you the Invisible Worm.”
A frozen pause.
“Mr. Z said that?” Arik’s voice cracked. “Really?”
She heard him wiping his wet nose on his sleeve.
“Stop crying,” she said. “You’re such a girl! And by the way, you’re always Mr. Z this, Mr. Z that. You’re obviously so in love with him. It’s pathetic! I mean, can I ask you something, Arik? Are you gay? ’Cos Mr. Z and I think you might actually be.”
He lunged at her, and knocked her back onto the bed. He grabbed her hair with one fist and cupped her mouth with his free hand. When she stopped struggling, he loosened his grip on her hair and reached under her skirt to pull her panties down. “I’m going to rape you. If you scream, I’ll kill you.”
Doing all this he instantly lost his erection, and he wriggled up against her body, desperately trying to reinstate himself.
“Fag . . .” she said softly. She enjoyed how it hurt him.
“Fuck you!” He persisted, grunting in frustration.
“Yeah, good luck . . .”
He bit her on the neck, hard. It only made her giggle, mockingly, so he slapped her, right across the face. This got him hard. He freed both hands and began to jerk himself off.
She stretched her arm out to the nightstand and groped around. When her fingers took hold of a library book, she swung its thick spine straight into his left eye. The impact it made on his soft flesh unnerved her but not so much she didn’t slam it in his face a second time—twice as hard.
The first strike left him too shocked to react; now he wailed: “Rose!”
She leapt to a position of safety at the foot of the bed. “Stay the fuck away from me!” She threw her shoes at him.
Arik grabbed his clothes. He climbed out the window into the moonlit night. She heard his ragged breathing and his footsteps in the grass recede.
Insistent knocking now on her door. “Baby, who make a big noise?”
“Nothing! Nobody.”
Just before midnight, Mr. Z called. Rosemary’s hands were trembling. A chopper was hovering over the house just then, rattling all the glass panes and her bones. Perhaps the cops had seen Arik clutching his eyeball on the street.
“What’s that racket? Want me to call back tomorrow?”
“No, don’t. I’m sorry—it’s just a chopper. Probably looking for evildoers.”
“Make sure you stay hidden then. You’re not going to like prison.”
She laughed, a little stiffly.
“Well, Rose?” His voice was calm, but she could hear the edge in it. “What did you want to talk about?”
“My mother’s bought plane tickets. I may not be here for New Year’s.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that. You’ll be missed.” Was that all he could say?
“And I want to talk to you about Arik . . .”
“Spare me, please. I’m not Oprah.”
She tried again. “Mr. Z, I know I’ve been a terrible friend to you. And I want you to know that I’m really sorry. For everything.” She took a deep breath. “You know, about that play that you wrote? I still want to do it, if that’s possible.”
A long pause.
“Go to sleep,” he finally said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“I just . . . I need to see you again.”
“You will. Now, go to sleep, little girl. Go to sleep.” His voice gained a soothing lilt. “And if you can’t sleep, take one of those Ambiens I gave to you the other day. If one doesn’t work, two should do the trick.”
They hung up. A few seconds later, a text from him appeared on her phone:
@};--
His electric rose was the most ro
mantic, most beautiful gift she’d ever received. The semicolon thorn seemed to be winking at her, telling her it meant no harm and was only there for verisimilitude. Unlike the wavering affection of boys, this rose would never fade and never wilt. It could be saved in her Inbox forever. With this thought, she drifted off to sleep.
Mr. Z was chanting in an exaggerated brogue:
How well I know the fountain, filling, running,
although it is the night.
That eternal fountain hidden away,
I know its haven and its secrecy,
although it is the night . . .
Rosemary climbed into the Nissan Maxima. Her nose was pink from the sudden warmth of his car. She removed her mittens and rested them demurely on her lap, side by side like angel wings.
“Any of this ring a bell to you?” he asked, of his recitation.
She shook her head.
“‘Station Island’ by the great Seamus Heaney. Some say it’s his best poem. It’s about the nature of inspiration.” He looked at her. “I’m headed off to Station Island myself. County Donegal, Ireland. I leave tomorrow morning.”
This was news. It left her gasping, the victim of a senseless mugging perpetrated in broad daylight.
“It’s only for a few weeks. I’m going to visit my dream temple at Lough Derg, better known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory.” He saw the stricken look on her face. “I need inspiration, Rose.”
The San Gabriels loomed purple and heathery above them as they ascended Lake, the avenue that ran straight up and up until it lost conviction at the base of the mountains. Rosemary mused on the word purgatory and its implications.
“Know what a dream temple is, Rose?”
She braced herself for another hurt-making answer.
“The ancient Greeks built monuments to sleep, where they sacrificed rams, drank their blood and slept in their fleece. And there they waited for messages from the gods to appear in their dreams. On Lough Derg, there’s a cave that pilgrims in the Middle Ages slept in for six days and six nights, to get what they believed was a sneak preview of purgatory. They received visions, premonitions—perhaps due more to poor ventilation and hysteria than anything else.” He threw her a grin to see how she was doing. “But generation after generation, pilgrims continued to go in there and they continued to emerge with ideas and visions. Many of them were writers with writer’s block. I wouldn’t be surprised if Seamus Heaney was one of them.”