by Ed Pavlić
Colleen said she spoke five languages, had been a romance languages and art history major at Oberlin. Shame thought he had heard of Oberlin but couldn’t be sure, gathered it was a college or a university. As Colleen went on Shame began to rely heavily on the reassuring pattern of pain streaming from a recent, formidable welt given to him by his roommate. He spent most of their first two or three conversations discretely brushing the marble-sized spider bite on the inside of his bicep and concentrating on the radius of pain that stretched down his arm and, it seemed, up from his hip at the same time.
Colleen had the impression that he attended her self-disclosures with a rare, singular attention and, in a way, she was right. Shame did enjoy the birdlike motion of her Oberlin, romance language–inflected hands when she spoke. The way her brown hair broke over her shoulders and the way her eyes must have been what “open” really meant. Whenever she spoke about herself, as if in the third person, she found an object at the bar or on the table to fix her eyes upon. Her eyes swallowed what they saw. Unlike anyone he’d met from the college clan, her voice always ended sentences with its tone turned down and curled back toward itself. He thought she had a healthy air of remorse about her. Soon after they’d met, Shame had decided to trust that about Colleen.
Shame hadn’t talked to Junior about it, yet. But he’d been playing that piano he’d found in the hallway night and day. While he played he noticed that his left hand wanted his right to curl notes downward and toward itself in a way that asked to be followed. At one point, in response to a surge of pain in his arm and a moment of overconfidence in his mouth, he interrupted her description of the way to fold egg whites into a meringue and how one should never attempt a meringue on a rainy day. “A meringue needs light, bright air,” she’d said. Shame interrupted, asking about her form on the harp.
–Harp?
–Yes, do you play the harp?
There was a pause, how long he didn’t know. Colleen was still. She stared at the table. After a moment, shaking his head in apology, Shame said,
–Sorry, go ahead—
–Oh, forget meringue. How did you know I played the harp?
By the evening of the dinner at his place, Shame knew that Colleen worked at an art gallery in a loft off of Madison and Halsted. He swallowed the urge to share that he’d known a DJ who had overdosed on the rooftop of one of those warehouses and lay there buried under snow until late spring. He let her continue. Colleen beamed with pride over the glossy-grungy profile of the gallery. An old-time freight elevator still opened its oversized, clanging metal door directly into the space, she said. Shame didn’t say he rode one exactly like it, usually accompanied by an old Polish man and five thousand pig hoofs, about ten times a day and six days per week. He suspected that she thought his job was what he’d heard people at Earlie’s call “alternative.” He never could quite figure out exactly what such things were alternative to. Nor did he know how he was supposed to feel about that.
He listened, though. He loved to watch Colleen glow with what a city could mean to someone who could live in a misty bluff town with a beautiful name and still need to imagine Romania or wherever to make her hands move when she spoke. She seemed to switch between voices as she named the international list of artists whose work they showed. “Lisboa, that’s in Portugal. Bogotá …” He loved it. Here and there, he asked, slowly, as softly as he could,
–Would you say that again?
Colleen thought Shame was a riot. He wasn’t sure how to feel about her reactions to what he said. She laughed out loud when he confided, “When I worked at a brewery, I knew a painter for a week in Houston, in the Fifth Ward.” When he didn’t join her laughing, she swallowed the laugh and replaced it with a look that seemed to contest the position of English as a romance language. One night at Earlie’s Shame had excused himself to the men’s room and returned to find Colleen still laughing at his mistaken impression that R.E.M. was “some English dude?” At that time Shame thought, wrongly, that Colleen was searching for an alternative to the alternative.
Colleen persisted her way down to Shame’s place and, give her credit, up the stairs and to his door. The place was almost empty at the time. Tubes of caulk, tools laid out on the floor; he’d agreed to store a vintage cigarette machine for Luther B, so that was turned with its back to the room on the wall facing the front door. The piano was directly opposite. Duct tape marked the space in the floor where his work closet would go. Most of the rest, not much, still sat in boxes in the living room along with dozens of glass blocks that would, Shame told her, go into the bedroom wall. Planks of plywood angled to the wall, no floor in half the bedroom. Shame said he was extending the room into the space of an old elevator shaft.
Colleen tried to look calm. She dropped the bottle of wine out of the bottom of the paper bag and darted to the floor to pick it up. Shame couldn’t tell if she’d caught it in the air or not. In her manic speed and the oblique way her motion almost swept up the sound of the bottle hitting the floor (if it had) along with the bottle itself, Shame caught a slow glimpse of what his situation must look like from the outside. Soon he found himself trying to act calm.
“The poor child was panic-stricken,” Shame thought. But Colleen wasn’t paralyzed. The bottle survived, a good sign. The bag had come apart, soaked by the unconscious electricity and sweat of Colleen’s grip. She bolted up straight, smiled widely, and handed him the bottle as if it had never fallen. The torn bag disappeared into the pocket of her coat. All that happened in one motion. Shame thought she should work for one of those magicians who disappear the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge. Or maybe a pickpocket? The woman had something. Give her that.
On the wall behind the bare wooden table, Shame had tacked up a painting he’d won at a Cuban cultural raffle in Miami. He’d gone with Felipé Moreno, a local laborer with whom he worked years ago when he was first on the road to stay. Shame was still in shock from my death. He was new to looking at the world as if everything was far away. Felipé’s mother, explained the laborer, as he gunned his Toyota Celica down I-95, was actually Puerto Rican, but that didn’t prevent him from hating Castro and American Democrats with a fascist abandon glowing in his eyes. Call it passing.
The Miami job was at a Tropicana subsidiary. Shame had a great time at the Cuban cultural festival. Cloudy drinks made his hands feel as far away as everything felt, and he was surrounded by women who wore mint in their eyes. Plates of seasoned meat pounded flat and grilled, black beans, yellow rice, and syrupy plantain. Unlike the men who dealt with politics through exceptional hair coiffing, the Cuban women Shame saw around him seemed to carry their fascism in their matching jaw and calf muscles. The calves for dancing, he understood. But he caught himself wondering what produced those protruding jaw muscles. Years later, a doctor told him that one could measure the latent anger people carried in their sleep by asking them to clench their teeth and flex jaw muscles.
Shame loved the flowery fabrics and the spectrum of light brown brows circulating around him. His raffle ticket, number 4104, was still taped to the backside of the canvas he’d won, to his embarrassment, at the end of the evening. They’d given him the painting rolled up with a personal note, also stuck to the back of the canvas, from the artist who had been there at the event as well. All night people had spoken to Shame in Spanish while he stood next to Felipé and smiled. They looked down at his black dress pants and work boots and asked, “¿Eres un artista?” Shame: “Sí,” feigning the beguiling silence he imagined must accompany all creative people.
The evening with Colleen pivoted wildly away from the tension created by her repressed nervousness and the underwater-shaped contours of Shame’s alienation when she sat down at his table and noticed the painting tacked up on the wall. She came to life in the most genuine, beautiful way. Shame hadn’t ever really thought of it as a piece of “art” and, stupidly, hadn’t connected it in the remotest of ways to what Colleen had described as her passion and her job at the gallery. Sh
ame made sure his passion—so close to rage, cover for despair that it had been—for his own work radiated inward, never outward, on or off the job. When she saw the painting tacked to the wall behind him, Colleen’s face seemed to accordion in on itself fourfold and pop back open with each panel in a different position. New eyes where her mouth was, a new voice in her eyes.
–Is that an early Bedia?
Still surprised by the changed face of Colleen’s voice, Shame had to turn around to see what she was pointing her fork at.
–That? No. I won that in a raffle where I was working years ago.
–A raffle? At work?
–No, at a festival a laborer took me to.
–Cuban?
–No, well, you could say he was a Puerto Rican posing as Cuban. Like I said, it doesn’t matter, this was years ago, in Miami.
And Colleen’s fork hit the floor. Her voice called all the way back to Winona, Romania.
–Mi-ami?
■
Colleen ate dinner facing Shame, determined to pretend the painting behind him wasn’t there. Her concentrated distraction distracted him. Her focus had closed down. She drilled his face while her glass of wine magically rose to her lips and back to its place at ten o’clock above her plate. Then she turned, flicked her chin at the piano, and smiled. Her eyes relaxed.
–Do you play?
–A little. You could say I don’t do much else, work and that. At least that’s the way it feels to me lately.
–That’s “a little”? I mean, I know you play. I’ve heard you playing that piano on the back wall at Earlie’s.
–Oh, that. That’s not even me, forget about that.
–Where did you learn? Did you study?
Colleen thought he was playing with her. People at Earlie’s often assumed Shame was joking when he wasn’t. It seemed to him that they laughed at the strangest times. Shame shook his head at Colleen in that way one shakes one’s head and it’s clear that the disagreement or mystery isn’t anywhere nearby. It was a perfectly reasonable question. She’d just asked it on the wrong planet.
–I think I learn in my sleep, more or less.
–Your sleep? Like one of those tapes for learning a language?
–No. No. I try and can’t play and try and can’t play. Then I go to sleep, go to work, come back and try again and the way I can’t play has changed. I still can’t play, but all of a sudden, here and there, things appear that I can play. Then I try that and can’t, and so forth. I guess. That’s how it feels to me. But it’s all stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing. Or even why.
Colleen held her fork midway to her mouth. The tail of a very fine, gold-link bracelet joined at a clasp dangled down. It wavered between a lower-case q and a small j in Shame’s eye. He followed the chain upward and saw that her hand trembled slightly. The bite of noodles hovered before her lips. He thought her eyes had narrowed again.
–Would you play for me?
Shame looked down and said very softly in an attempt to be more gentle than he knew how to be,
–I said I can’t play.
Colleen looked at him through a slight squint in her vision. She decided he either wasn’t angry or it didn’t show. He wouldn’t play for her. But, she decided, he wasn’t playing with her either. He wasn’t being coy. She could also see him underestimating her. She’d become used to that in her dealings with the male species. Then again, maybe he was putting her on—he probably went to Berklee. She’d known a dozen musicians at Oberlin. They often slept in practice rooms but, she sensed, that wasn’t what Shame was describing. She decided on a little test to see if he’d give her a better clue.
–Shame, would you mind if I took your painting up to the gallery sometime?
–Take it when you go, if you like. Why?
–Not tonight. Sometime. I’d like to see where it comes from.
–You mean other than Miami?
Utterly no clue there, she thought. Colleen’s laughter just then was really at herself; it covered what Shame thought he saw in flight behind her eyes.
–Yes. Other than Miami. Is it signed?
–Maybe on the back? I forget.
–These noodles are fantastic. They’re meaty but not stiff at all. Where did you get them?
Shame tipped his head to the kitchen.
–In there.
–You made them? From scratch?
–No. From eggs and flour. And a little crushed caraway and cardamom. You’ll be glad to know I bought the sausages, however, from a Polish butcher an old man at work told me about.
Colleen traced arrows of wind and power lines blown cursive on the canvas over Shame’s shoulder. The noise of the wind was almost visible between them.
■
Their forks and knives were in their plates. Wine glasses empty. A bottle of Scotch and a bowl of ice sat on the table. Colleen and Shame had slid back in their chairs. Their reclined positions made the conversation seem longdistance, possible. Shame’s feet propped up on the edge of the table.
–You asked where I learned to play piano before.
Shame had said that he learned to play in his sleep and he meant it. He’d rehearsed in his sleep for years, maybe all of his life, before he’d ever touched a piano. Maybe everyone did? He didn’t know. When he wheeled the piano out of the hallway into his apartment a month or so before Colleen’s visit, he’d pulled up a chair. He didn’t know why. To fill space maybe. Then he put three fingers of his left hand down into the keys. The sound that leapt back at him felt like it leapt directly out of him.
Most of the brick he handled at the jobs was floor brick, two and a quarter inches thick, ceramic tiles. They were dense, smooth, and deep red in color with wax on the top and sixteen quarter-inch grooves on the bottom side. Shame was right-handed. To carry brick, he picked them up with his left hand and stacked them in his right arm. He picked them up mostly two at a time. Together they were about five inches in width. In a hurry he could pick up three brick with his left hand but it didn’t pay to hurry. Why hurry on someone else’s time? Especially when there was nowhere to get to by hurrying, just more brick, as the old men he worked with put it, “down in that other town.” And anyway, the foreman was militant about chipped brick: “We’re not building garden walls in this goddamn mill. The man’s not paying us for ‘rustic.’ You break a brick in a fool’s rush, you pay for it.”
The first thing Shame learned about the piano was spaces. A musician would call them intervals. Oscillations of spaces made a rhythm with a distinct pattern of tones, two intertwined stories. Shame could feel the stories, the tone and the rhythm, pull apart and tangle toward each other in his arms, in his legs. It was like waves at the breakwater or wind in the trees. Headlights through the curves in Washington Park made trees dance with their shadows. Fish broke from the place where a stone hit a pond. Birds in a flock lay down in a field like a deep breath. Something spun backward into his hips pressed into the high-blare of the brick saw. The lateral, painful pull of blood in his veins at a glimpse of the free world from inside the fence of the job: a thin brown girl disappearing on the back of a motorcycle in LA that still felt like the molten core and sum of his broken life. Three little girls’ voices boomeranged and tarantella’d their way around an open fire hydrant in the summer sun. The way lean, stick-thin boys fell in to defend a fast break on a basketball court. The flung-loose weight of the dead alive in the love of the living. A keen and material, almost mineral, agility that sprung into action in the moment of helplessness. Smoke in the eyes of a woman who talked him to sleep with her hands.
Shame put his left hand on the keys and the sound of stories X-ray-visioned his body. It was as if scenes from the world had fallen into him and then resided there. They then went on their way, as if somewhere beyond him, intact within him, a mirror image in profile, someone beyond him. Facts. One brick, two, three, one white one black, two black, two white. “So it all goes in, and it goes in whole, almost without us,” he remembered thinking,
after his first moments touching the keys. “It goes in whole and then we can only pull it out in pieces. Even with a light touch, it’s broken. Ruined.”
His middle finger worked on its own. And he remembered panic and that slip-silver pain that appeared behind his eyes and in his hands. He’d play something twenty times and he’d have to physically shake the pain from his hands. The pain wasn’t from the playing. It was the touching and the breaking, the piecing and retrieving. It was the ruin. Pain? It wasn’t like the pain, real pain, his pain on the job. The pain the company bought with his time. Truth was, with this piano-pain, he really couldn’t tell if it hurt or not. At work, if it was his pain, that meant someone else owned it. He knew who, he knew how much they paid him for his pain. Now he wondered who owned this pain he was playing around with on the piano. And who paid for it? If he didn’t know that, how could he tell it was pain and not something else?
Within a few days he began to see how to do what musicians would call diminish and augment. This controlled color in the stories. If he slipped a finger up a key he tilted the color of the story east, toward the lake, toward morning. Slipped one down and dimmed the shade to the west, sunset. As if from another life, Shame remembered listening to Nat Cole use his left hand as a synonym for effortlessness. No monstrous stride rhythm, no bravado, no hundred-dollar diamond chip in a front tooth, no bravura. Left hand wasn’t nothing but loose change thrown on a tabletop. That was the act, and it wasn’t nothing. He remembered wishing that Nat Cole had refused to sing, just talked back to the effortlessness, the lie of ease, happening over there in his left hand, over to the west. And to the east, hot feet on thin ice. Nat Cole threw his hands like a magician threw his voice across a room, found something you’d lost a year ago, and took it out from behind your ear.
Shame could taste the rhythms. Then people appeared. And he’d pick up brick with his left hand on the keys and follow them down the street, into their kitchens; he’d follow the shadows and white crests of folds in a sheet wrapped around someone’s ankle. The number-four-on-its-back shape made by one leg drawn up into a beam of sunlight, the shadow of heat from a radiator on a worn wooden floor. Taste of coffee-skin, whiskey-skin, a whiff of fresh nicotine in the breath behind a kiss. He played with his right eye closed, left-handed stories. One rhythm swallowing, one two-timing in his chest, a vein-twitch in his right thumb, the way a hard blink cut the story back two frames. Lives spliced. Taste this. A spoon held out across a counter, steam from a stainless pot on the stove. The economics of opening your eyes, the search for who owned you. The modern mystery. How we stole ourselves off and sold ourselves back. Price high enough meant free? How everything, always, insisted on itself and something else. Everyone consisted in themselves and someone else, the way a glimpse of a stranger could tilt the world and spill you down the street. A human geography. Hours of tilted and tipped spaces east, west, stretched skin over shoulders, up the back of thighs. Sun in the room. Trouble in mind. Repetitions, hours, go and go and nothing, ever, happened twice. Repetition on its way out of sight and into sound nearer to the old-time delta of the newfound darkness than the eyes ever got.