I stared down at the plate of macarons, which our waiter had slipped on the table unobtrusively. They were arranged beautifully, and I picked one up but couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it. My stomach had gone off. Too much rich food with dinner. Too much wine.
“I thought the man wasn’t what he seemed,” I said. “That was your premise.”
“No, you’re misremembering.” John reached over and took the cookie from me, ate it clean in two sharp bites. “I said that what you saw of him wasn’t the whole truth. That doesn’t mean that what you saw was a lie. Just that”—he glanced towards the ceiling, considering—“I don’t know, he has lizard skin underneath. Or feathers. A reverse swan, if you will. Zeus on the outside.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Drummed my nails on the table.
“Oh?” John licked his teeth.
“You make him sound so wretched, but really, what is he? A rich man who loves music? I’ve heard of worse.”
“Well yes, but—” John mimed my earlier choking motion. “You know. His perversions.”
I shrugged. John put his hand over mine. I flattened it against the table, and he flattened his own, to keep the contact. “We’re just playing. Don’t get upset.”
“You don’t listen to yourself,” I said. “Do you?”
We looked into each other’s eyes.
“Well, I’m going to go pay the bill.” John stood up and caught the attention of our server. His voice had gone tense, his jaw set. “You come when you’re ready.”
“You don’t listen to anything,” I said to his back. “It’s no surprise you don’t get invited to tour anymore.”
He didn’t turn. Small wonder.
Outside a group of people walked by, laughing. It was spring, the city beginning to thaw. I sat still and finished the last of my champagne. Considered drinking John’s too, but thought better of it. At the front of the restaurant, John laughed with the waitress as he handed her a credit card and signed the slip. To look at him, you’d never know he was angry—would never know he’d ever been angry in his life.
The day of Finn’s party I woke up early, the sun softer and warmer in the dawn than it had been the afternoon before. I was alone but hadn’t been for long—the pillow beside me was depressed in the telltale shape of Finn’s head, and still smelled like him, dust and musk. There was a shape lodged in my throat, making it hard for me to draw normal breath. A heart, beating. A small animal, curled in a ball. I rolled into the hollow Finn had left in the sheets, masking his scent with my own.
The fire, the smoke. I’d known it would cause problems. Sinking into the mattress, I pulled the duvet up over my ears, hoping that a little more rest would clean me out. Wash away all remnants of the previous evening.
On its surface, the ranch was rustic—it told the story of a Mexican hacienda, with small orange and pink casitas dotting the land around the main estate. When I first rode into the courtyard, my gameness for adventure had stuttered, as I imagined scratchy woven blankets and hard wooden chairs. But the antique touches were just for show. One layer down, everything here had been built for comfort.
Still, I couldn’t find sleep—still, despite my bed and its deep well of feathers, despite the crisp sheets. No matter how I arranged myself, I was too aware of my body. Tiny hairs crackling on the back of my neck. Ribs abutting stomach and spleen. The memory of a finger tracing a line down my back. I felt too alive, too touched to drift off.
And then there was the issue of my throat, that shadow shape.
Get out, I thought. But it sat firm, small bean. Silent passenger.
With a sigh, I sat up, holding the blanket around my shoulders. A window beside me allowed in streams of light where a triangle of curtain had been folded back—when? Finn had wanted to show me constellations. Finn had crept out in the morning, perhaps before the sun bled into the sky.
Outside nothing tempered the landscape. Cactus and rock, bone and tree, jutted from the earth where and how they wished. Contradictions refused explanation: the sky through my window was clear, but the sand was speckled with rainwater, the scent of which lay over the morning like a shawl. What are you doing here? The question came to me from the air. And I remembered.
The stage. A real reason, a good reason, to have come all this way. To have pushed and pulled John into a fight, and then tumbled down after him, much further than I expected to go.
I pulled on jeans and a long cotton shirt, hasty dress against the wind. My plan was simple, if vague: find the right path and reach my destination. If there was a path, that is. Knowing what I did about Finn, it was entirely possible that the stage was hidden and we’d need to be led there by some sort of native guide. He liked a show. Though at least he had no trouble admitting that. No hesitation about telling you what was a performance and what was real as breathing.
As luck would have it, I slipped outside without meeting anyone else in the hacienda. An hour later and the other guests would all have been out to waylay me. Polite hellos. Curiosity. I’d have had to look at their bodies and try to map the sensations in mine to possibilities in theirs. Like coded words being translated back to ordinary meaning.
A bruised lip. The strange heat on my thighs. My neck, cooler than usual where the wind hit it. And my hair, which felt tugged—my whole scalp loosened. My body raggedy and strange, and beautiful.
That’s what I felt, anyway, when I only read the pleasure.
Outside I looked around myself for some orientation. There was a promising path down by the fire pit, and lacking any greater insight, I began to walk it. I had an absconding schoolgirl feeling, of being alone when and where I shouldn’t. The roads on the ranch were just brushed dirt, so every step crunched beneath me like crackers in my teeth. But when I looked over my shoulder, no one was following my noisy footfalls. No one seemed to care where I was going.
Shadows fell from the mountains, but to the northwest the desert was already bathed in sun. Elevation changes were rumpled into the hills like clothing discarded on a bedroom floor. Around me everything looked identical and mischievous. Tall spiked spires covered in green leaves, flat paddle cacti spitting needles. If it hadn’t been for the path, I would have lost my way immediately in the blur of brush and flora. As it was, I had a difficult time believing that I was making any progress—indeed, that there was progress to be made. A stage, here? Would it sit on top of the boulders, or beside them?
Then I turned a corner and saw it.
The canyon narrowed, funnel-like, towards a passage that was fit only for rib-thin coyotes. In front of this passageway sat the stage that my agent had promised me, embraced by the canyon walls. Posts poked up from each corner like turrets, perhaps to support a canopy that hadn’t yet arrived. One half of the structure, still shaded by the overhanging rock, was wet with dew. And on the other side, in the sun, sat Finn. He had a hammer in his hand. A few nails scattered around his feet.
I stopped, surprised somehow to find him there. The stage was supposed to be for me. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. Didn’t you want this? I brightened my face into a smile.
“Really?” I called out, hands cupped around my face to make a megaphone. “You’re building it by hand?”
But Finn didn’t seem any more delighted to see me than I was to see him. His face remained blank, officious, as thin wings of discomfort brushed against my neck. Perhaps he had come here specifically to be alone. Here, on his birthday, with his dawn thoughts. Perhaps we were the same in that way. A kinship, but not a fellowship, or a comfort.
My throat tightened up and I coughed.
“Sorry,” I said. The shape in my throat twitched, moved. Reshuffled. Finn just stared.
When I was a child, I used to play games, imagining myself transformed into a rabbit or a cat, urging my spine to flex out and my fingers to withdraw into paws with hot, dry pads where my palms had been. I hadn’t thought about those games in years, but now I felt the same urge bubbling up in me—to change and become unrecogni
zable. My arms might fuse to my sides, my legs harden into a single stalk. My body shift until only a hint of my head and neck remained—the suggestion of shoulders that cowboys leading trail rides would point to as a minor landmark. The lady cactus, the canyon ghost.
Finn looked down at his hands and, as if in afterthought, held a nail up to a board and hit it in. Three hits. Neat.
“Since you’re here, why don’t you sing me something?”
He didn’t glance up when he spoke, and so it took me a ridiculous moment to realize he was talking to me. But when I did, something inside me responded to the idea, as it always did. Loosening up, relaxing. Singing, after all, was simple. In that act I had no need to speak, or to remember the night before. I could simply disappear inside myself, go deep inside my body, my voice. Escape, for a short time, the weight of my life.
Become airborne.
I was thinking of the stringy skeleton of a saguaro cactus; Finn had pointed some out on our ride. He said that small animals bore inside the cacti to make hidden colonies, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking. But I liked the idea of birds nesting within me, moving through my bones. On the outside, my body would be a fortress, and inside I’d house an army of gilded flickers.
Well, that would be amazing, John’s reply came to me unbidden, and I heard also his sardonic laugh. The shape in my throat shifted.
“All right,” I called back to Finn, then walked to the stage. There was a stairway on the side, just four steps high. I walked skyward. “You want a preview?”
Finn shaded his eyes from the sun. “Equipment test, ma’am.”
The boards on the stage were unfinished. It was, I realized, a temporary structure. And no wonder—out here, the wood would degrade in the sun or end up nibbled to scraps by passing animals. Maybe, in time, it would become a nest.
Love is a rebellious bird—so says Bizet’s tragic heroine Carmen. She cries out: Love is a gypsy’s child who has never known the law. The bird you hoped to tame beat its wings and flew away. Just then John, at home in Chicago, was probably waking up for coffee. Using that same thick-bottomed mug he always liked, and washing it out so it would be ready again whenever he wanted it. He used to tease me that I sang like a sparrow, and when he did I’d hit him with things—pillows, a single shoe—because a sparrow has no range. Has no power.
And yet here I was, in the middle of the desert, and all I could think about was birds. A rush of feathers brushing against one another in my mouth, like slips of silk. And then a river of bodies sailing into the air. Flick-flick-flick-flick-flick. Leaving something behind so that I wouldn’t forget them. A seed. A feather, tickling my abdomen. Or, to call her what she is, a child.
So you see. I was wrong to think that I could run away and make my life lighter. If I hadn’t been there, hadn’t left John alone to wonder about me, if I hadn’t sung for Finn and watched his eyes dance in the firelight, there may have been no Kara. No birth. And so Ada wouldn’t have been in the hospital either, wouldn’t have fallen to the cold tile floor.
On the ranch, I opened up my mouth and let sound rumble from my deepest well. Not knowing, then, who I was really singing to. Si je t’aime prends garde à toi! I thought it was a wake-up call for the sleepers in their beds. I didn’t know it was a warning.
If I love you, you’d best beware.
4
I heft Kara onto my naked waist and check the temperature of the shower with one wrist. Among the things I cannot yet do is walk to the gym and swim laps in the beautiful pool there. I pay a considerable monthly fee for access to the facility, though I never use any other piece of their equipment. Why run on a false rubber sidewalk? Run from what? Why lie down on a piece of foam that is saturated with sweat and body toxins, only to lift a heavy bar above my head? The pool, though, is unique.
Sixteen floors high, the gym’s building has an atrium on its penthouse level, a bubble of steel and sea-green glass. Beneath this dome is a grotto lined in white and blue mosaic, the water never too warm and never too cool. I asked the front desk girl about their arrangement once: how had the gym’s management convinced the building owners to let them install a pool in that premium space? The girl leaned across the front desk, her eyes sparkling. It was already there, she told me. They had simply remodeled a bit, adding new tile and revamping the showers.
Baba Ada used to take me swimming with her at the YMCA—not as plush, but it was enough. She sat on the concrete edge of the pool and tucked her hair into a bathing cap, swung her arms around a few times before sliding into the water. Instead of letting me run to the shallow end and splash around with the other children, she insisted on keeping an eye on me. When I was very young this meant sitting on a chair and watching her curl into a ball below the surface, pushing off the wall like an otter. When I got older, it meant pacing her in the next lane. Each stroke I swam could be counted into measures and bars, a slow crawl allowing me to play out a cello sonata, breaststroke popping like tango.
Sopranos are not, as such, required to be beautiful. But I’ve never found that it hurts to keep my limbs slender and strong, darken my eyes with liner and just a smudge of shadow. Swimming is part of my life’s rhythm. A legacy from Ada. But it’s also—how did the doctor phrase it?—taxing, and so for today, this is the best I can do in terms of water. A warm shower in the morning. A hot bath at night.
Kara’s mouth is open as I step under the stream, and she widens it slightly, closing her eyes and screwing up her face. Her forehead wrinkles with a special intensity as she’s drenched, and I turn so that my own back occupies the majority of the flow.
“Shh,” I say, jogging her gently up and down. This is good practice. After all, in another week she will be baptized, a priest cupping cold water over her skullcap. Perhaps if we spend enough time in the shower beforehand she won’t be daunted.
As it’s planned, I’m supposed to join the choir at the ceremony, which I gave Baba Ada free rein to arrange. When she told me this I shrugged—I’m more than proficient in “Ave Maria.” But she made her preparations, and I agreed to them, when I was only halfway through my pregnancy. When she was still alive, and I thought I would sing to Kara, lullabies and arias, from the very day of her birth. Now I think about my lungs and twist a bit, trying to feel them behind my ribs. I take half a breath and huff it out, part of a warm-up I’ve used since I was six and enjoyed pretending that I was a dragon. It doesn’t hurt much but sends my pulse racing anyway. I imagine walking up the nave of the church and splitting in half across the altar.
At this moment, my babenka’s body is in the ground. Not festering, as we had her cremated, but still buried. I found it very hard to believe that the small box of ashes they gave us was her—even if we all lose some essence at the moment of death, it didn’t seem to weigh enough.
I was in the hospital for six days, and when I was released we went to visit her in the mortuary, where she had been arranged and clothed and powdered. Apparently they do these favors even when a body is earmarked for fire—that, and keep it in cold storage up until the very hour of its conflagration. We were nervous on the way over, as if by waiting even those few days to present the baby we’d violated the basic rules of decorum. When in fact, bringing her at all was unusual, at least according to the mortuary staff. John called ahead to let them know we were coming—polite, it seems, in all circumstances—and when we arrived we were ushered into a small room that was not unlike a suite in some anonymous hotel. There was even an electric kettle and a selection of inexpensive teas. Baba Ada had been laid out on a table, wrapped up to her chin in an acrylic comforter that matched the wallpaper. Green and gold whorls. I laid my head on her chest, and it crinkled. A plastic, stuffed animal sound.
Tissues had been provided for our convenience. The institutions of life and death are nothing if not thoughtful, prepared.
I barely remember her funeral. John says it was lovely, but then again he arranged the whole thing—amazing how quickly an event of that size can be thrown t
ogether, when needed. I do remember that it was cold. The doctor recommended that I be wheeled up in a chair, since there would be a fair amount of standing and moving about, and I was still quite freshly opened. So Kara and I sat wrapped up in our respective blankets, just two bundles taking condolences from a faceless line of mourners. You’d think some great and specific accident had taken place. Ada dead. Me, near crippled. And then this baby, hale and pink, but totally helpless. Lying in my arms as heavy as a handbag.
In the shower, Kara begins to squirm. “Shh,” I say to her again. Her many layers and rolls are slippery, and for one heart-stopping moment I feel my grip slide. Kara cries out just twice, warning shots fired across the bow, and with great difficulty I kneel down, resting her in my lap as I grope for the bath tap. From this angle I can see the majestic difference between then and now, the way my stomach slopes and bunches in new patterns, my skin the color of sickly milk. The angry scar.
When I was nineteen, in a hotel room far away, I stood in the shower with a man twice my age whose hair streaked dark beneath the water. We were in Rome, and he was a stranger, more or less. He had spotted me from the audience of a performance of Massenet’s Cendrillon while I pranced around as one of the spirits who send the opera’s lovers into an enchanted sleep. A minor part, but I caught his attention. His hands ran down my slick side, over my ribs, and into the hollow of my waist.
I can’t remember his name. Perhaps I could if I tried.
He whispered to me and I closed my eyes so that the water seemed to be rain. Soft and warm, his voice tickled the coiling hollow of my ear, brushing the small hairs deep inside, near the drum. What did he say to me? Only silly lovers’ nonsense. I’m totally disarmed, I’d give you anything. What did he do, when he wasn’t wooing young women in the dark of night? I never knew. He might have been a banker, a preschool teacher, a surgeon. I’m naked of myself, he said. You have everything. I don’t want anything for myself anymore.
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