Interior. Evergreen Avenue loft. Kat, backlit by windows, scissors the sleeves off a T-shirt.
People will say, isn’t that wild that you two knew each other in high school? What are the odds? As if Kat becoming famous and me receiving some degree of—what? highly focused niche acclaim?—were independent of each other, like lightning striking the same place twice, or sisters winning the lottery one week after the other. But the truth is simpler than any of that: Kat became Kat because of the times and the tastes and the ways that her personality made her catnip for a certain breed of music fan. If she was cast as the Red Queen of post-punk pop, I was her court painter. But if we were monarch and courtier, we were also model and artist. People who know me only for my photos of Kat talk about her like she was my life’s work, when she was only my first subject. If I was lucky to have a subject who became famous, even notorious, then Kat was lucky too: lucky to have someone get it all down on film, to create a public memory of who she was every step of the way.
And there’s this, which gets overlooked: The pictures aren’t good only because Kat is in them, they’re good because I took them. She was perfecting her art while I was perfecting mine.
Interior. West Randolph Street condo. Kat’s face in profile against a black-and-white tile floor.
Someone at the party called me. Someone who knew that Kat had a roommate who might be able to put her back together and get her home, though I don’t think getting her home was as much of a priority as getting her out of where she was—where in this case being the gut-rehabbed third floor of a former slaughterhouse west of the Loop, a place owned by a guy who called himself a club promoter, which meant he had access to enough drugs and big enough speakers to turn any room into a party. This was when Kat was losing a lot of friends. This was when Kat was making worse decisions than usual. This was when Kat had started going places without me.
I rang the buzzer and the alleged club promoter pointed to a door and he didn’t say, Hi or Thanks so much for coming or We’re really worried about her, he just said, In there. And in there was nothing I hadn’t seen before, though maybe a little worse. She had one arm draped across the back of the bowl, and she was trying and failing to keep her hair out of her face. She had already puked a ton. I flushed the toilet, which Kat hadn’t had the will or the ability to do, and she startled as the water roared in her ear. She looked at me through the sweaty fringe of her hair. I thought she was going to say my name, but she just said, So sick over and over again like it was her mantra. She retched and threw up, retched and spit out a little more. She looked up at me again through her bangs and her eyes were rolling in her head. She seemed like she was trying to focus. If I was a good friend or any kind of friend I would have held her hair and stroked her arm; I would have put a cool washcloth on her forehead and told her that it was going to be all right. I would have kept flushing with each heave, instead of letting the bowl fill up with a night’s worth of casual poisoning. But instead I swung out my Leica—a bulletproof camera, the one they use in war photos—and started shooting. I got her leaning there using the toilet bowl like a pillow. I got her with the stuff pouring out of her like tar. I got her lying on the cool floor, the frazzled burr of her head against the smooth solid base of the bowl.
Contact sheet. Twenty-four-exposure study of an Econoline van during load-out. Location unknown/forgotten.
You should do a book, someone said. You should put them all together so people can see what she was like, before. And I could. I have thousands of pictures. Each one different. Each one telling the same story.
Kat on her first night as a blonde—her first night looking the way that most people remember her, the way she looks on the cover of the first album, with her bleached hair and black jeans spray-painted on her skeleton’s legs.
Kat getting the thorn-wrapped heart tattooed at the nape of her neck, the one that she’d rub with her index finger when she was deep in thought or bored or distracted or nursing some grudge.
Kat in that ridiculous ski hat she used to wear—pompom on top and earflaps down each side. She is tottering toward me on an icy sidewalk with her arms spread wide and her lips puckered like she’s about to plant a big wet kiss on my face, or on the lens.
Kat at Montrose Harbor in the bright sun with the sky so clear you could put your fist through it. It was late fall and the wind was tearing at her hair and beyond her you can see whitecaps and closer to her the lake is hurling itself against the rocks, and in the middle of all this motion and light Kat looks so. Goddamn. Tired.
This is my fear: that it would be like watching a whole carousel of slides from your neighbor’s trip to the Grand Canyon. You’d ooh and aah for the first five pictures or so, but there would be another ninety on the way. Somewhere in the middle, you’d stop caring, and before you reached the end, you’d hate your neighbors, hate the Grand Canyon, hate the entire Eastman Kodak family of companies. None of this is going to make her more real for you. And none of it is going to bring her back.
Interior. ICU. Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Close-up of Kat’s hand cupping three pills: pale blue, dull yellow, off-white.
No one agrees with me, but her last album was her best. Most people stopped paying attention during her years in LA. They got tired of watching her push it too far, they said the music was never as good as those first two albums, and they all wondered why she didn’t just get it over with and die already. Instead she came back to Chicago and after lying low for a while, she put out an album with a small indie label run by guys too young to have been burned by her on her way up. I imagine that recording it, playing all the instruments herself, and knitting the tracks together must have been like those long airless days in her parents’ basement. I say imagine because I wasn’t there; I had abandoned Chicago shortly after Kat left town. I had planned on sticking around and being smug about how I was keeping it real, 312-style, but when I saw my chance to go east, I went. By the time I came back to see her, after months of promises and see-you-soon messages, she was sick and then she was gone. Anyone who had guessed overdose or razor to the wrist or self-immolation must have felt cheated. She got a stupid cancer, one that had nothing to do with any of her more toxic habits, and that was it. Right before her body betrayed her that one last time, she was tiny and bald and her skin was like cigarette paper. I wanted to scoop her up and carry her back to our old loft, to the couch where we had curled up all those years before, watching reruns of Cheers and M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and everything else WGN threw at us. Kat had fallen asleep on my shoulder that night. I listened to her breathe. I watched her dreaming eyes twitch. Her face was soft and full, despite the bruise that painted her left eye. Seeing her in that hospital bed, that’s what I wanted: to carry her back home.
That’s what would happen in the dream sequence where the best friends are reunited after the falling out, the bitter words, the long silence, the gradual thaw. But I did not spirit her away. When I found her in that bed, wiped out and with little left to give, I aimed the lens and started to shoot. Because not getting those pictures would have wrecked it—for me. And, I hope, for her.
Looking at all of the pictures now, I can pretend that she was the only one with the what-the-fuck? look, the what-makes-you-so-special? look, the do-you-even-believe-your-own-bullshit? look. But she’s also the only one with the thank-God-it’s-you look, the just-trust-me-on-this-one look, the I’m-sorry-please-forgive-me look, the look-that-I-only-give-to-you look. This is when I wish that there had been another me as devoted to me as I was to her. Someone to offer me proof that I looked at her like that, instead of just gawking with one big dumb glassy eye that only asked for more, and more, and more, and more.
MOLLY McNETT
La Pulchra Nota
FROM Image
Do not love the world or the things in the world . . . For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world p
asses away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.
—John 2:15–18
Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts. For the word of the LORD is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.
—Psalm 33:3–4
MY NAME IS John Fuller. I am nine and twenty years of age, born in the year of our Lord 1370, the son of a learned musician and the youngest of twelve children—though the Lord in his wisdom was pleased to take five brothers and two sisters back to the fold. After a grave accident, I no longer possess the use of my hands. Any inaccuracies in this document are not the fault of the scribe, who enjoys a high reputation, but of my own mind. My pain is not inconsiderable. However, I will continue frankly, in as orderly a fashion as I am able, so that these words may accompany my confession to the honorable vicar of Saint Stephen’s.
My story begins as God knit me in the womb. There my knees pressed in to form the sockets of my eyes as they do in all men. However, my left knee—the cap of which has a sharp embossment—pressed upon the iris, pushing it to one side. While I am able to see clearly, it appears to others that the eye looks away from the place I have trained it. God be praised for this deformity, for it kept me close to him for the better part of my life.
My first memories are of two sounds—one ugly and one beautiful. As a child I lived in Oxfordshire in the northern Midlands. An old church stood in the center of the village, and in its center demesne what I thought must be everything the world could possibly contain: a bakehouse, granary, pigsty, dairy, an assortment of dovecotes, and a malting house. Once I recall walking on the outskirts of this enclosure with my father when there came an ugly noise, dry and papery, as menacing as a snake’s warning. My father quickly lifted me to his shoulders and ran toward our cottage. Looking back, I saw a man whose skin bubbled up like a dark pudding—a leper, I later learned, required to wear a rattle to warn us of his coming. In one moment his eye caught mine from high upon my father’s shoulders, and the look he gave me was so sinister that I have not forgot it. It seemed to say that only my father’s body separated us, that in its absence the leper and I were one.
Our cottage was built at the edge of the village, along the banks of a tiny stream. One hot afternoon I awoke from a nap transfixed by the highest, sweetest sound I had ever heard. It was as if I could see, in my mind’s eye, this sweet sound rapidly tracing the petals of a flower before plummeting down its stem. I learned later from my father that one capacity of the human voice had been described in such a way by Jerome of Moravia—as a vocal flowering. I went to the window. There my mother joined me, pointing to a nest in the bank-willow tree.
“That nest,” I asked, “did you make it?” For my mother was skilled in weaving, and in fashioning all kinds of things.
“Of course not,” she scolded me. “It is mother bird who builds it.”
“How can she make it so?”
“God gave her the knowledge,” she said. “Nothing perfect comes but it comes from God.”
Then from somewhere in the tree the beautiful thick chirp came again, a trill and a sweet clucking. How I wanted to see the bird! But as much as I strained and leaned, she did not appear.
“How does she learn this song?” I asked.
“God puts the song in her breast,” said my mother.
“And how can it be so sweet?”
“Tiresome boy.” She smiled. “This also comes from God.”
“And my eye?”
Her mouth twisted in irritation, and she dropped my hand. “From God,” she muttered. “The good and the bad are from God . . .”
And perhaps I remember this day so clearly because, soon after, it pleased divine providence to take my mother to the Lord, may he be praised for all things. This was in the year of our Lord 1376, in the month of June.
After my mother’s death my father accepted a position as an organist in the town of Bishop’s Lynn, in Norfolk. He explained to us that an organ was a wondrous and expensive piece of equipment, and only a church of good means could acquire one. We children admired our father greatly, and as the years passed he taught us whatever he knew of music and instruments.
At two and twenty I married a woman named Katherine, nine years my elder and the daughter of a well-to-do burgher. Her father accepted my appearance. “Though thine eye may wander,” he jested, “see that thy heart does not.” I assured him that because of my appearance, I was a devout man and had never been burdened with lust or pride. Katherine’s inheritance was more than I might have hoped for, and we did not want for money. We had a cook, a maid, and a nurse; and Katherine was wise in shopping, never fooled by watered wine or the old fish sold at market, rubbed with pig’s blood to make it look fresh. We enjoyed our supper over pleasant conversation, and in the evenings I would play the gittern or the psaltery, for my father had given me a small collection of instruments and I loved nothing more than music.
Katherine herself could not keep a pitch, and sometimes when I hummed a little tune without thinking, she might ask me to stop. But no wife is without such cavils, and she was gay in demeanor then, as middling comely as befit a woman of her years, and forthcoming in wifely duties. I was pleasantly surprised in my enjoyment of these, and called myself happy in life.
In the second year Katherine was with child, and when her time came she labored through the night. Never in my life had I heard such lamentation, and I wondered how the throat could bear such pressure unscathed. The midwife came out for the rose oil and sat on the stool beside me, her head in her hands, and when hours later she fetched some vinegar and sugar, she took bits of lamb’s wool and tucked them in her ears before entering the birth room again. When finally the dawn came, I heard a small cry, but most of an hour passed before finally the midwife brought the child down the stairs to me. I was happy, although it was a girl. And as I held the babe, she brought another—twin girls.
I knew Katherine to be a good and honest woman, so I could not believe that twins must be sired by two fathers. But of course many did believe it. When the days of her purification were completed, Katherine was received, according to Leviticus, back into the church, made clean to make bread or prepare food. But on the way home that day some women tore the veil and wimple from her head so that she was made to walk home as bareheaded as a harlot. In the following week our neighbors spun a yellow cross to mark her garment and left it at our door, and spat at her as she went to market, and spat upon her babes. My old father the organist would no longer speak with her, and my sisters and brothers would no longer look upon her.
Was it out of sadness that Katherine refused me my marital rights, even as a year passed? I will never know. We did have a common devotion for the sweet creatures she had borne. We employed a nurse whose breasts were large enough for two, yet not large enough to flatten the children’s noses, and we took joy as these two began to smile and babble and their curls were growing long. For my part, I felt a relief and pride at their smooth kneecaps and beautiful straight eyes. For though the woman carries the seed of the child, they may have shared my deformity. Together we looked and wondered at them as one wonders at the heavens and all the beauties of nature. They were so entirely alike that only a few tiny spackles on the nose could distinguish elder from younger.
But divine providence was pleased to take the life of our dear twins two days apart from each other, the first on the fifth of June at the hour of terce, in the year of our Lord 1393. Then I too was taken sick, and woke from my fever one morning to find that the second twin had been gathered back to the Lord on the seventh of June at 5 o’clock, in the year of our Lord 1393. For this may the Lord be thanked and praised, for every devout man knows the great mercy he shows us in taking a child out of the world. Yet had they stayed with us—had even one stayed—I believe I would not have this story to tell.
Katherine was a good woman, and, until this time, perfectly ordinary. But she began to weep all the day long and into the night, and
no comfort I offered was of help to her. One winter’s day I could not find my wife and, looking out the window, saw her sitting in the snow with her skirt spread round her. She wore no coat. I sent the nurse, who hovered over Katherine as she rocked back and forth on her heels.
“Sir, no coaxing could get her inside,” she told me. “She says she is warm inside the body, and God tells her not to fear illness.”
Then she leaned in and whispered, “She wears no knickers under the skirt.”
Shortly after this incident, it pleased the Lord to take to paradise my father the organist, and for this may he be praised in his wisdom. I was given the tutelage of some of my father’s students who lived across the canal in the old city where there were large stone dwellings of Roman style. I found these houses impressive, for our own was timber, post and beam, and so close to its rotting neighbor that the two dwellings leaned on each other at the top like a pair of boureés.
My pupils were young girls who lived in the old quarter, from wealthy families in which the boys studied chess and hawking and the girls embroidery and singing. Most of them did not sing well, yet the lessons were pleasant for me, a diversion from our home and its growing strangeness.
Katherine no longer did the shopping. Together we went out only to church, and there she would cry. The cries began softly, and then grew to sobs, and she fell forward to the pew in front of us, and then into the aisle, writhing and groaning with a sound as great as the one she had poured forth in labor, so that it was only prudent to gather her and take her from the sanctuary. Then she smiled fiercely, her eyes gleaming in ecstasy.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 29