by Carole Maso
She choked. “Coward,” she said. “He snuck out behind our backs. I’m not going to make it easy for him. He didn’t even say as much as good-bye.”
Alison remembered how his eyes dimmed. And how he had hugged her just before going into the house. It was not a good-bye exactly, she thought. No. It was not exactly a good-bye. She felt suddenly breathless. Not angry but sad. That he had not exactly said good-bye. She bowed her head for a moment and looked up to see Candace boarding the bus. Finally she spoke.
“Candace,” she said.
“Don’t call me that! It was his mother’s name.” She scowled, forsaking the woman she had cared for so deeply, and she fell into her younger sister’s arms and cried.
On the bus from Northampton to New York, Candace decided to keep her name, become rational, a detective, a spy, destroying her father’s life as he had destroyed hers. Her goal was set. The future was no longer nebulous. She was not seduced by the headiness of the season, the cows in every pasture, the smell of hay and rain and lilacs. They had come early this year, she thought, and she began to cry again. Where would she be this Father’s Day? she wondered. This Bastille Day? On West Eleventh Street, she thought, in the family apartment. And where would he be?
She would find him. And when she found him. . .
She took out an empty notebook. She wrote Strategies on the first page.
Candace Calls Alison
“He’s got this tiny studio on Carmine Street on the ground floor. Gates on both windows—depressing. There’s just a mattress on the floor. I don’t know where all his stuff is. Maybe in the closet? But picture it: Dad in this little room. I don’t even know where his music is. There’s just a mattress on the floor and—this is the weirdest thing of all—next to the mattress there’s a little glass bowl, half filled with water. Just Dad, a mattress and a fucking bowl of water.”
“Her name is Belinda Hansen, but, get this, her nickname is Biddy. Probably from when she was a child. Too cute even then, huh? But somehow it stuck because along with Iddy it exactly describes the size of her brain.”
“You can follow her career through the class notes of her college’s alumni magazine. She went to Wheaton, class of ’77. How did I find out? I’ve got a murderer’s eye for detail.”
“She’s an actress who never acts. She goes to a lot of classes though. Changes hairstyles a lot. Sits in cafes.” “Those who have talent are obligated to pursue it, and those who do not have it are obligated not to!” (Max, stay out of this.)
“I looked into her apartment from the fire escape. Clearly, Father is taking a vacation from Standards, overlooking everything, including the Billy Joel album on the turntable, the garish display of relatives’ photos and photos of the dog, large five-by-fives of the face of the dog. The fish (no face) overcooked and stuck to the bottom of the pot, the floury sauce slightly burned. The answering machine taking messages for toothpaste-commercial auditions, mouthwash commercials, dog food commercials.
“And the sex is pathetic. She’s constantly saying, ‘Just hold me, honey!’”
“OK, Candace,” Alison says.
“It’s pathetic. In the middle of the summer Biddy is sleeping in one of those long Victorian gowns with high collars, long sleeves and lace. It’s ridiculous.”
“She’s a vegetarian, and she goes on little vegetarian crusades. She eats granola, yogurt, raw bee pollen, rice cakes. She can tell you stories about calves put into pens where they are not allowed to move their legs, so the meat stays tender.”
“Oh my.”
Stay out of this, Max.
“She would give up her career to go save stray dogs. I eat everything now, Alison. Veal. Lamb. Every one of her innocents. I eat the cutest bunnies from Ottomanelli’s you’ve ever seen.”
“There is something decidedly morbid in using your own dear mother’s death to bring tears to your eyes on stage when no tears will come. Her only authentic emotion, I suppose. But would you dig up my fingers, Ali, up from the garden, like a dog, tasty as they might be? Nutritious too.”
“You’re going too far, Candace.”
“Would you?”
“Candace.”
“Would you dig up my fingers, exhume my body? I don’t know. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. She’s Scandinavian. Swedish, I think.”
The dog divides neatly into pieces, like a chicken.
“Why did he have to leave?”
“He’s become a cliché. A man who leaves his wife for a younger woman. Another middle-aged man who is afraid to die. A coward.”
Jesus and the Beautiful Woman
He hears himself saying, “You smell like jasmine, like myrrh. Honey and mushrooms and nuts.” His voice begins to swim. “You are precious, precious,” he says. “You glow like the star at my birth.”
He’s frightened by his own passion—this woman, this dark Jewish woman, appallingly beautiful, musky—her pendulous breasts, her full hips.
She kneels down. She offers to anoint his bare feet.
Jesus weeps.
She offers to wrap him in her hair. To take him somewhere far away . . . Her open body like a boat.
He pricks his finger on something sharp. He starts to bleed.
“I would anoint you with oil,” she murmurs. “I would feed you cheese in a leaf.” Jesus shudders. “I am wet,” she says. “I am wide and deep.”
“I’m thirsty,” he whispers. “Please.”
She presses her finger to her full lips and then to his. He does not pull away.
Maggie Asks Alison
“One loves art more than life; it’s better than life, don’t you think, Ali? It doesn’t disappoint so,” she sighed. “It’s not so frightening,” she said, her eyes filled with terror.
IT IS ALWAYS the beauty of this portrait head—its purity, freshness, radiance, sensuality—that is singled out for comment. Vermeer himself, as Gowing notes provides the metaphor: she is like a pearl.1 Yet there is a sense in which this response, no matter how inevitable, begs the question of the painting and evades the claims it makes upon its viewer. For to look at it is to be implicated in a relationship so urgent that to take an instinctive step backward into aesthetic appreciation would seem in this case a defensive measure, an act of betrayal and bad faith. It is me at whom she gazes, with real, unguarded human emotions, and with an erotic intensity that demands something just as real and human in return. The relationship may be only with an image, yet it involves all that art is supposed to keep at bay.
Faced with an expression that seems always to have already elicited our response, that not only seeks out but appropriates and inhabits our gaze, we can scarcely separate what is visible on the canvas from what happens inside us as we look at it. Indeed, it seems the essence of the image to subvert the distance between seeing and feeling, to deny the whole vocabulary of “objective” and “subjective.” And yet few paintings give their viewer such a feeling of being held accountable. If what follows may at times seem arbitrary or impressionistic, I can only say that I have tried to remain open to the painting’s address, to keep it continually in view and—a more difficult matter—answer to its look as well.
The Omniscience of Jesus
The lilies trumpet his arrival. The birds sing his praises. He could speak back to them. He could speak in any language ever invented, but he does not drop a single foreign word into his speech.
He could tell us things: to look for the names Bach, Brahms, Mahler, or that the world is not flat. He could tell us in advance what we’ll regret. He could show us exactly how a Synclavier will work, but he’s not a show-off. He’s very modest. Though he will be painted again and again, he does not seem to be posing.
But he’s starting to say strange things like “she has lost enough,” or “a star explodes in my head,” or “the hour is at hand.” He doesn’t know what to say anymore or leave unsaid.
The Second Page of a Letter Never Sent
Oh, don’t think I don’t admire you out there i
n the goddamned middle of nowhere.
I look out my office window, Caroline, and it’s a veritable three-ring circus and my tendency is to exaggerate this but, Jesus, there really are roller skaters, fire-eaters, unicyclists, parrots, snakes, magicians, torch-song singers, belly dancers. I miss you. A visit would be nice. I remember you sane. Much saner than this at any rate.
Love,
Alison Labels the Trees
Summer was here and the trillium and violets had given way to Indian paintbrush, daisies, firecrackers, to raspberries, monarch butterflies, oranges and reds. She missed him. She had thought he loved them. She thought he loved them still. But how to explain it, then? How could he cause such deliberate and terrible pain and still love them? She turned the question over and over in her mind. No answer came. There was no answer, she believed now.
“Mom,” she had said that day in spring, in an adult voice already, a voice which seemed about to announce some unbearable sorrow, though not shocking or surprising—quietly, some inevitable sadness. She spoke calmly, because somewhere it had already been accepted. “Mom,” she had said, looking at her mother who held the letter in her hand, reading it again and again, folding and unfolding it.
“What is it, Alison?” her mother had asked.
“It’s Daddy.”
“Daddy?”
“It’s Daddy, isn’t it?”
“Daddy.”
“He’s gone away, hasn’t he?”
She walked to her mother’s side now. “It’s a beautiful drawing,” she said.
“Poussin,” Maggie smiled. “It’s a real beauty. How lucky to be able to copy something as lovely as this into a notebook. To copy his genius. To feel his hand guiding mine. Such balance and grace. Such proportion, harmony.”
She wanted to ask her mother what she thought, did he love them at all anymore, and if he did how could he have done such a thing? But she did not dare ask her. Even with Poussin guiding her mother’s hand, it trembled. What to do? She had left the Renaissance behind and begun to wander from one painter to the next searching for solace.
Alison thought of the étude for the left hand her father loved to play. Never a very good pianist, he joked that he should be able to play with two hands what others could play with one. Written for two pianists who had lost the use of their right hands. If he were here, she’d ask him to play that one-sided étude now. She’d ask him who wrote it. She closed her eyes. Saint-Saëns, she thought, that’s it. She could almost hear it. How beautiful, she thought, for the pianists with no right hands. What happened to those hands, Daddy?
Alison went for a long walk and listened to the wind blowing through the leaves. There were so many trees here, she thought, perhaps she should label them so as to keep all the names straight. It could be a project for her and her mother. Summer stretched out before them like a challenge. Alison filled each day with such projects. If she could label the trees. If she could know the names of the parts of the sink. It was comforting somehow. After she labeled the trees, making a small white card for each one, she made a list of plants. It was an odd list, she noticed, but she continued with it anyway.
She imagined her mother and father were holding hands when they saw the bear. Keenly she watched for the bear’s return. Surely it would be a sign of luck. If she could only see it.
They were doing the best they could. In the evenings they would still go out and look at the stars. With her mother strangely absent, Alison alone would try to identify the constellations of the summer sky. Her mother had taught her to find one bright star, one distinguishing star and move from there. There was Vega, and Arcturus, the reddish star. Alison tried to trace Cygnus with her finger in the sky. She looked down at her book. But was it Cygnus? Or perhaps Hercules? And wasn’t all this part of the Northern Cross? It was so hard to tell without her mother’s help. Well, there was Cassiopeia, that much she was sure of. Maggie just looked up at the beautiful sky, identifying nothing.
There were fireflies everywhere and it made it seem like the stars were all around them—at their feet, at their hands, right within reach; they seemed to be drifting in space. How beautiful the country is, Alison thought. This heaven of stars. This world of nameable trees.
“Tomorrow’s the Balloon Festival in Cummington,” she said, looking up at the sky still. At dawn the hot-air balloons would be pumped up. Hundreds of them—their brilliant, huge heads rising up over barns, lighter than air. The family had gone every year since Alison could remember. She was sure it was her first memory of the world. A sun, a stripe, a great curve, a basket rising. “Can you say ‘balloon’?” her father asked Candace, who screamed it back with delight. “Balloon! Balloon!”
Last year the morning of the balloon fest had been particularly hazy. The dark orange sun burned through the fog casting a strange and wonderful light, illuminating all who had gathered to watch the great balloons be inflated. Farmers, women, children, cows and goats, sheep, a few horses. Alison picked a favorite balloon, as she had every year, and watched it fill up. But this year was different. As it rose high, above the trees, high above the beautiful countryside, Alison realized her lips were moving, though there were no words yet. She simply watched it float up higher and higher, growing smaller and smaller, and she whispered, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased,” and caught off guard by such a sentiment, she began to cry. She trembled and could not stop crying, and Candace was there and comforted her, Alison, who never cried.
“Let’s go in now,” her mother said, the stars still blazing overhead. Alison nodded and took her mother’s hand. She was tired. Tomorrow the two of them would get up at dawn and go to the Cummington Farm, same as every year since Alison could remember. People pointing. People looking up. The strange, graceful balloons rising like some enormous hope.
It was about three o’clock that morning when Maggie made her nightmare run through the house, leaving a trail of light, her long robe billowing behind her like a white balloon. “Is your father back yet?” she asked, sweating, turning on one lamp after another, running from room to room in her sleep.
Alison, awakened by her mother, did not remember much of her own dream, but thought she knew something now she hadn’t known before. It was this: that bears have poor eyesight, but great noses. And so that even that summer evening long ago, with all of them together walking down the path, the bear must not really have seen Father very clearly, or any of them. When he looked at her family, he saw only a blur. Henry, Maggie, Candace, Alison—they were only a smell.
Candace’s Dream
Alison’s List of Poisonous Plants
Plant Toxic part Symptoms
Hyacinth Bulbs Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea.
Narcissus May be fatal.
Daffodil
Castor bean Berries (seeds) One or two castor bean seeds are near the lethal dose for adults.
Lily-of-the-valley Leaves, berries Irregular heartbeat and pulse, usually accompanied by digestive upset and mental confusion.
Rhubarb Leaf blade Fatal. Large amounts of raw or cooked leaves can cause convulsions, coma, followed rapidly by death.
Yew Berries, foliage Fatal. Foliage more toxic than berries. Death is usually sudden, without warning symptoms.
Elephant ear Any Can be fatal.
Wild and cultivated cherries Twigs, foliage Fatal. Contain a compound that releases cyanide when eaten. Gasping, excitement, and prostration are common symptoms that often appear within minutes.
Burning bush Leaves Potentially dangerous.
Mock orange Fruit Potentially dangerous.
Cummington in Summer
The long, slow spring that year turned into a summer of vibrant green and the artists came en masse. Poets, painters, playwrights, performance artists, novelists, composers. All wild to work, to talk and to share, share, share. Neurotics, psychotics, manic-depressives by the dozens. Nymphomaniacs, homosexuals, not to mention bisexuals by the dozens, a few heteros and a rising contingent of snobbish asexuals. Rep
ressed divorcées, unrepressed mothers of two, unwedded single parents of one. They brought their children. They came armed with bug sprays, flashlights, mosquito nettings, contraceptive foams and moved into the Frazier farmhouse (my house), the Vaughn stone house and the cabins in the woods: the Astro Cabin, the Hexagon, the Red Cabin, the Dome. They moved into the Sculpture Studio, the Music Shed, the Red Barn. They moved their children into the Children’s Barn. The children had names like Olympia, Gabriel, Cleopatra, Yoho, Chantal, Narcissus. They came from Boston and Maine, the backwoods, the Live Free or Die State, the Sunshine State, the Show Me State, the great state of California. Mostly, they came from New York. They were successes, failures. Macrobiotics. Feminists. Teachers on sabbatical, teachers on summer vacation. Waiters and waitresses who served every imaginable type of cuisine: Middle Eastern, Thai, Northern Italian, French-Vietnamese, nouvelle cuisine. Literary waiters (The Algonquin, The Russian Tea Room) and those who catered to the tourists (The World Trade Center, Mama Leone’s). Hip waiters (The Odeon, The Milk Bar) and lots more from that cultural mecca, New York (The Kiev, Indochine, The Magic Carpet, etc., etc.).
There were word processors and other temporary agency workers of every imaginable kind. Phone-sex employees, ex-Jesuits out of work, scene painters, medical-text illustrators, au pairs, and me, the author of Delirium, a best-seller in paperback, a major motion picture. All of us thrown together suddenly on these one hundred acres of land, in one common pursuit: ART. Working and working and then passionately not working.
Inseparable ties formed overnight. Vows of love declared in nearly every cabin. Dramas of enormous proportion.