The porch was piled with carefully stacked, evenly split wood, a professional job. The ax hanging from a nail on the wall had an edge that gleamed. I didn’t doubt that Danny could swing it. The wood filled the space; only an area in front of the door was clear. This door, obligingly, had a curtainless window in it. Heedless as a fish biting down on a lure, I stepped up to it and looked inside.
It was a scene out of Bosch, complete with demons and, belching from the cast-iron stove that squatted in one corner, the flames of hell. The furnishings were meager: a card table, two metal folding chairs, a sagging sofa the color of dried blood, and a side table with a red-shaded lamp that partially obscured my view of the main event. This was going forward on a bare mattress in front of the stove. Rita was naked, on her hands and knees, back arched, hair wild, features contorted in the ecstasy that so often resembles pain. Behind her, equally naked, Danny Grunwald was gleefully occupied, ramming something cylindrical into Rita’s delicate parts. She laughed and talked as she worked. Mercifully, I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I could imagine it, which may have been worse, though I doubt it. Her eyes, which had always struck me as piggish, glittered like burning coals, and her tongue flicked sprays of saliva into the air. She was built in square blocks, with large, sagging breasts attached at the front. Her skin, in that diabolical light, looked like meat. They were both turned away from me, so I was free to look as long as I wanted. What exactly was that instrument Danny was using on Rita? Which orifice was she penetrating with it? I pressed my face against the glass. Rita dropped her head forward and made a bucking movement with her hips. Danny leaned over her back and grasped one of her breasts.
The voyeur spying on lesbians, who is detected and invited to join in the fun, is a stock feature of pornography. Men would pay to watch a man in my position; I knew that, but the last place I wanted to be was on the other side of that door. I don’t deny that the sight of Rita disporting herself excited in me feelings hitherto unknown. It was hot, all right, but the heat, which became every moment more unendurable, wasn’t in my cock, it was in my brain.
I stepped back, clutching my head. Wiring was shorting out in there; I could hear it, sputtering and popping. I had to sit on the step because my knees were rubbery. A pile of snow, dislodged from the eaves by my collapse, dropped down on my neck. Great, I thought, and then, who cares? I didn’t bother to brush it away. I was busy experiencing, for the first time, the bracing shock of total betrayal; there really is nothing so cleansing. Born alone, die alone, love a mirage, life a cruel joke, death standing in the wings, the one who really wants you, the only one who cares. I was in pain, but I didn’t feel like crying. I had the sense that something hidden had been revealed, not about Rita, who was clearly, from here on out, the “other,” the “not me,” but about myself. My expectations had been banal. I was stupid.
Eventually I got up and walked back to my apartment. I tried to read Chekhov, who had a lot to tell me about betrayal, but I couldn’t concentrate. I turned out the light and sat in the dark, fell asleep on the couch again. Sometime before dawn Rita came in. I didn’t ask her where she’d been, which provoked her to trot out a veritable circus of lies. “Rita,” I said, “I was on the porch tonight, watching you through the window.”
This was a hammer blow, and she staggered beneath it. Come on, I thought, tell me I didn’t see what I saw. After a moment she said, “Danny thought someone was out there.”
“Well, Danny was right.”
Then we had tears, apologies, protestations, vows; it went on for a long time. She wanted me to go to bed with her, which I told her was impossible; I was fresh out of anything hard enough to satisfy her. More tears, buckets of tears, suicide threats. When she was exhausted we got into bed and fell asleep with our clothes on. Toward morning I woke up, found her straddling me, thought, What the hell, and did it. We got up, wary as cats, ate breakfast, minimal, polite conversation, and I went off to my class. At the door Rita kissed my cheek and said in her most earnest manner, “Maxwell, you have to forgive me.”
I didn’t forgive her, but I thought of her during the day, and that part of me that had hardened toward her thawed around the edges. Simon, the handsome professor, stopped me in the hall to say he was hosting a dinner party for a visiting writer, just a few faculty, selected students. “We thought of you and Rita.” This cheered me up. Real food, I thought, probably meat, wine from regular-sized bottles. “That would be great,” I said. “I’ll tell Rita.”
The snow stopped, the sun came out. I had a few student conferences, all about their regrets or the lack of them. In the afternoon I walked across the campus, pondering Rita. What was she? Did she know herself? When I got to the apartment, I flung my bag on the couch and called her name. Just once. That’s when I noticed the Olivetti was gone.
I took my coffee into my study and stood at the desk, looking down at Rita’s boxes. In some bizarre, chimerical fashion, she was in them, impatient for me to make up my mind and get to her. “Come on, Maxwell. You know you’re dying to.” Not just yet, I thought. I grabbed my notebook and went out to the screen porch. It was a strategy. When it was sunny out and the desk did not entice me, sometimes it worked. I laid out my arsenal—pen, notebook, coffee—and sat looking out at my yard. Birds were chirping; the air was warm and damp; my geraniums, the only flower I can grow successfully, sparkled in the early morning light. Pamela’s deep purple clematis, cared for on her side of the fence, billowed over and made a lush display on mine. My eyes rested upon an oblong flagstone half hidden by a spirea bush, the grave of Joey, my late companion, dead, by my reckoning, three years now, felled in his youth by a cancerous growth resulting from injections the vet said he needed to keep him alive. He was a big cat, fourteen pounds, powerful but shy and goofy, not much of a hunter; his prey slipped through his paws. Sometimes when he tried to jump up on a chair or when he was tearing up the stairs, he missed his mark and landed on his side or his butt, always with an expression of discombobulation that made me laugh. His last months were hard. The tumor grew so large it pushed up into his neck, making it difficult for him to turn his head. Still, the vet said, he wasn’t in pain, he was eating, cleaning himself. Occasionally he tried to catch a bug or stalked a squirrel. He tired easily but didn’t sleep much. In the afternoons he searched me out and leaned against my leg until I took him up and held him in my arms. Then he would sleep for a few minutes, always waking with a start, as if he’d been dreaming and waked into an unfamiliar world.
His death was sudden and awful. The tumor, evidently full of fluid, collapsed, sending a blood clot to his brain, or so the vet speculated when it was too late. For perhaps fifteen minutes he screamed in agony, crashing against the walls, tearing at the air; I couldn’t get near him. Then he was still but breathing hard, the air rasping in his throat, his eyes wide, swarming with terror. By the time I got him to the vet, he was gone.
I was angry about it all, angry at the vet, angry at myself, angry at death. I brought Joey home, got out my shovel, and dug his grave. I wanted it big and deep, and I dug for a long time, until I was standing in a hole above my knees. At the start I wept, but as I worked I began to take an interest in doing a good job. One could do worse than be a gravedigger, I thought. I wrapped his body in an old pillowcase, laid it in the hole, down in the earth where nothing could disturb him. Then I shoved all the dirt back in on top of him. Pamela gave me the stone; she had it left over from a path she’d made in her own garden. Later she planted the spirea, which required no maintenance.
Down in the earth. The phrase arrested me. I took up my pen to write it down, feeling it might be the start of something. To my chagrin, the pen was dry. “For God’s sake,” I said. I pitched the pen in the trash as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the desk. The boxes were waiting, quoting Rita: “Among other writers, I was good. I was doing good work.” It struck me anew as an uncharacteristically modest remark for Rita to have made, but she was in her conciliatory mode, tryin
g to convince me that I should care what happened to her, now that no one else did. I chewed the end of my pen. It was sad, Rita’s life, especially the end, dragged off in a sack by the police, her corrupted body disposed of at the public expense. Did they bury her somewhere, in some paupers’ field, or was she incinerated along with other undesirables, the vagrants no one claimed, shoved promiscuously into a furnace, like the doomed dogs and cats at the pound? And then what? Did they scrape the ashes into plastic bags and cart them off to the landfill?
Whatever they’d done, that corporeal substance, once beautiful, later unlovely, containing the turbulence that was Rita, was no more. For twenty years she’d been a dim figure from my personal past, and there had been moments—not many—when I wondered what had become of her. Now I knew. She had entered the historical past, that densely populated terminus for which we all hold a ticket. She wasn’t going to call, she wouldn’t turn up at my door, she couldn’t know what I did with the heap of cardboard and paper she had directed to me in an effort to entangle me further in her miserable fate. What, after all, did I owe her?
Pursuing this question, I went back to the porch. I was thinking of Franz Kafka and Max Brod. I’d heard somewhere that when Kafka read his dark stories to the very small group of his admirers in Prague, he was so convulsed by laughter he could hardly get through a sentence. It occurred to me that Brod had disregarded Kafka’s wish that his work be consigned to ashes not because he couldn’t bear to deprive the world of the complete works of his friend but because Kafka was just that, his friend, someone with whom he had shared pleasant hours of camaraderie, conversations, laughter, someone he missed. Publishing the manuscripts was a way to extend the friendship he had enjoyed, to keep his brilliant, quirky, ironic friend alive.
Though we had briefly been lovers, there was no sense in which Rita and I were friends. She had seldom been even routinely kind to me. I didn’t miss her. If offered the opportunity to call back to life Rita or Joey, I knew I would choose, without hesitation, the cat.
Sound thinking, salubrious, this was the way to go at it, out in the warm, clear light of day, without sentimentality or superstition. I sat down to the notebook, calling up the phrase that had tantalized me earlier: down in the earth.
I’d been mistaken. It wasn’t the beginning of something new; it was the end of this story. I looked out over my property; I’d want a spot as far from Joey as possible. There was a mass of invincible pachysandra thriving in the sandy soil near the fence. I could pull it aside and lay it back on top when I was done. It would grow in by fall.
I was calm; I wasn’t vengeful. I’d give Rita a chance. I would put the boxes in a hard plastic case—I had a number of them I used to store my own manuscripts—space-age stuff that would withstand a century or two of the old diurnal roll. I swallowed the last of my cold coffee. Then, with a sense of purpose and well-being, I went out to the shed to get my shovel.
THE OPEN DOOR
At breakfast Isabel said, “You hate men because you want to be one.”
“Oh please,” Edith replied, buttering her toast so hard it broke. The only sliced bread the baker had was the equivalent of zwieback, unless you wanted salted pizza dough. “Spare me the deep psychology.”
Isabel shrugged. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I like men too.”
Edith poured hot milk into her coffee, thinking how pleasant it would be to throttle Isabel. “You’re just lucky I’m not one,” she said.
Isabel turned her attention to the newspaper, folding and flattening it next to her plate. As she read, she stroked her thick forelock back against her temple, a gesture that sometimes filled Edith with desire, but this morning it was just one more irritating thing about Isabel. This trip was a mistake. Edith should absolutely have refused the invitation, but there was nothing to be done about it now. She must just get through it somehow.
Last night’s reading had been a fiasco. The audience was made up of women who had come to flirt with one another and couldn’t be bothered listening to the poet they had paid to hear. When she looked up from her text, Edith saw Isabel whispering into the ear of a voluptuous blonde dressed in red elastic and stiletto heels. At the reception Edith was trapped by a tweedy Italian academic who confessed herself to be a passionate lover of Emily Deek-in-son. “Wild-a nights, Wild-a nights,” she intoned, closing her eyes tight and holding her glass of prosecco out before her like a microphone. Edith looked past her to see Isabel and the blonde clutching one another’s forearms to keep from collapsing with laughter. Afterward, in the taxi, Isabel opened the window, which she knew Edith hated. “It’s so warm,” she said, rosy and flushed from the wine and the attention, leaning her head back against the seat; she was practically purring. Edith looked out the other window and saw the Colosseum whirl into view like a murderer leaping from the shadows. Isabel saw it too, and regarded the monstrous rubble dreamily. “How I love Rome,” she said. “Couldn’t we live here someday?”
Not on your life, Edith thought as she watched Isabel brush her toast crumbs off the newspaper onto the carpet.
“I see the government is dissolving again,” Isabel observed without looking up.
Twice in two days Isabel had accused Edith of hating men. Did this mean she was thinking of leaving Edith for a man? An Italian, no doubt, one of these swaggering babies who Isabel would claim understood her because they were both Latins. While Edith had to spend the morning at the university talking with students who had read her poems in bad translations, Isabel was lounging in some piazza with this man, chattering about how wonderful Rome was and how impossible it was to live in a college town in godforsaken Connecticut, what a word, and of course the man would try to say Connecticut, fail miserably, and they would both laugh until they wept.
Edith answered another question about Emily Deek-in-son. Yes, she was an early influence. All American poets had to address that astonishing gift sooner or later; and then a young woman raised her hand and asked a very specific question about a translation of one of Edith’s poems, which this student thought was inaccurate. It was the word choke in a poem titled “Artichoke,” which the Italian translator had rendered cuore, “heart.” Edith found this an entirely interesting and appropriate question. She explained that the word choke meant the tough, matted center of the vegetable, an inedible part, not the heart, which was soft and delicious. The English word had a verb form as well, to choke, which meant “to strangle.” Edith grasped her neck between her hands, pretending to choke herself.
“Strozzare,” the student said. “We have a pasta called strozzaprete.” The audience laughed while Edith waited for the translation. “Priest strangler,” the student said. Edith beamed at her. “Exactly,” she said. “You could say ‘priest choker.’ ”
At the reception Edith kept an eye out for this young linguist, and when she made her shy approach, sipping nervously at her cup of Coca-Cola, Edith motioned her in, cutting short a conversation with one of the organizers of the event, who was explaining how important it was to promote the free exchange of culture. “Your question was interesting,” Edith said. “What is your name?”
“Amelia,” the girl said. She was thin and awkward, her dark hair cropped short and her myopic eyes made large by the thick lenses of her glasses. “I am an admirer of your poems for many years now.”
“I wish you were a translator,” Edith said. “You have obviously given more thought to the difficulties than some professionals.”
“It is difficult,” Amelia agreed. “Especially poetry like yours, which is so passionate.”
Edith patted the young woman’s bony shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying that, Amelia.”
It was what Isabel had said, years ago, when she finally read a manuscript of Edith’s poems. Well, it was almost what she said. “It’s surprising,” she said. “I think of you as cold, but these poems are passionate.”
Edith had mulled over this qualified praise for some time. To Isabel a person who did
not act upon every impulse was cold, and it didn’t occur to her that the systematic repression of powerful emotions resulted in a hard surface that contained a core of molten lava. She had no interest in the Victorians, whom she dismissed as prudes. Edith’s reticence was a source of amusement to her. She liked to parade around the house in scanty gowns; after her bath she sat naked on the chair in the bedroom, rubbing scented oils lovingly into every inch of her flesh, as serene and rapt as a child in its mother’s arms. She was affectionate in an overpowering, leonine way, grabbing Edith by the waist or arm or even by the neck and hauling her in for unexpected hugs and kisses, and if she detected any flinch or tremor of reluctance, she would push her captive away, saying, “Oh, you are so cold. What will it take to warm you up?”
Better she should ask, Edith thought, what it took to make me so cold. She knew all about Isabel’s happy childhood; she was the darling of her Italo-Spanish parents, who traveled widely, always moving in bohemian circles, the mother a painter, the father a successful photojournalist. But when Isabel politely asked about her childhood, Edith knew she had no real interest in the subject, so she said only, “It was a farm in the Midwest, completely boring.” She didn’t describe the poverty, both spiritual and physical, the bone-aching work which was her lot from the time she could lift a plate, the battle zone of the shabby domestic scene, the parents whose hatred for one another found expression in rage at their children for being born, the strong possibility that when she was grabbed by the arm, the waist, the neck, what she was about to receive was not an expression of affection.
“I didn’t come to life at all until I went to college,” Edith said, and left it at that, sparing Isabel the details of those painful years as well: the paralyzing social awkwardness, the repulsive sexual encounters with young men whose sole desire was to insert their penises into a woman’s, any woman’s, mouth, the yearning after beauty, the discovery of poetry, of a world so utterly exotic and exciting that she had to take it in slowly, like a starving child who longs to gorge but can barely manage a spoon of gruel. She entered the classroom too awed to speak and sat quietly in the back, her heart racing as the professor elucidated what was to her the syntax of flight. She still remembered the night, alone in her dorm room, when she read an Elizabeth Bishop poem and collapsed across her bed in tears of such agony and joy that she could hardly get her breath. This was life! This was light! This was hope, even for her!
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