He pulls back onto the highway.
“Have I ever asked for … anything?” Her voice is quiet. Perhaps she thinks he cannot see her fingers twisting in her lap. Perhaps she thinks he would not care.
He shrugs. “We talk.”
She looks at him a long time. He drives several more miles.
More, they ask, more, then more than there is to give. He has nothing left. Tell her. “Okay, Beulah. How do we do this?”
“You want games. You want rules.”
“I hate games.”
He is surprised by his vehemence.
“And they’re all you know.” She waits, but he will not bite. “One day soon, Donald, maybe somebody will find a game you love.”
“Are we doing this or not?” Tell her everything this time.
“Truth or dare.”
“Whatever, Beulah. Ask.” Everything you never wanted to hear.
“First the dare.”
“For Christ’s sake.” It comes to this. Childishness to embarrass him. His position, the difference in their ages.
“Show me how much you mean it, show me you care. How much. You want this as much as I do. You should see your face. Truth or dare.”
“Christ …”
“Okay tell you what, Don—I go first. Truth … or I go back to school for you. How’s that?”
“At this exact moment, Beulah, I could not give a shit what you do.”
“Better, Donald. Much. A baseline for our polygraph. Now you.”
“It’s always something like this. Some crazy shit or other.”
“Nothing to dare?—this is sad, old man, sad very sad.”
She sits sideways in her seat. “Leave your wife.”
“Leave it the hell alone.”
“So protective. So noble.”
“I’ve told you before—”
“Fine, protect her. Do. Truth—tell her about me.”
“Fuck this.”
He wants to help her out, she wants to pull him down.
“You’re the specialist, Professor Gregory—how come you’re so bad at this? Okay something easier, let’s see, Truth … or you come to Mexico with me. Call it a sabbatical.”
He knows she means it. She has risked asking him to come with her. And now she sits, brave child, awaiting the lash of his contempt, shaming him. Fucking childishness.
“Tons of hot springs in Mexico, Don.”
She refers to a small water fetish of his. He imagines the two of them locked together in a death struggle in some tropical hotel room … this is just about the furthest thing from his fantasy. Tell her.
“You’re just begging me to hurt you,” he says. Still the fading hope they could just let it drop.
“I don’t want her life, Donald. I just want into yours. Once.”
He takes his eyes from the road to look directly at her. “But that’s not all of it.”
“I want you to look at yourself.”
“You want to save me. Because I’m living a terrible lie.” He keeps his eyes on her, as the car hurtles through the rain at ninety miles an hour. She is unconcerned that in the next instant they may die. He reads this clearly in her eyes. This is not a death she fears. He looks back to the road.
Always near the end, these scenes. The tawdry, the plangent, the operatic, the sophomoric—they are relentless, they are legion, these young women. Just once he would like one of them to do this with grace. Stoke contempt to a cold burn, this is his trick. Use it again. The antidote to this thing that clanks and scrapes up inside his skull like an iron grate.
“Something nobody knows about you. Something you’ve never told a soul. Told … her.”
It is in the way she says this, something in the reverence she pays his wife. He has an image of the pain about to enter that beautiful young face. She is just a girl. But is it pity he feels now or something more familiar, something sickening. They are not good for each other. She is not good for him. She wants him to hurt her.
“Is it over, Donald? Isn’t that what you’ve been waiting to tell me?”
“No. But …”
“Soon?”
“How can I know a thing like that?”
He is not so angry, now. He knows that in her way she is doing this for him.
“No, Beulah, not yet.”
She sees he is very close to telling her. “You ask me what I want. See me. Not this.” Her small, long-fingered hands give a little flick as though sweeping crumbs from her lap. “Just once.”
What he says next is not what he meant to say.
“The first time she left my father I was a year old.” The edgy little gesture he makes—little toy soldier saluting—to keep her from speaking feels comical, such an urge he gives himself to laugh at times.
“I’m supposed to believe this.”
Her voice is small and hollow. She has given up hoping for this. He glances over at her.
He sees how much she wants to believe.
“She ran, for almost ten years. The first time, he found us the same day. At the side of the road.”
“And you’ve never told Madeleine.”
“You and I’ve talked about this, Beulah. About why there’s no point to all this talk—because it’s meaningless. You’ve said as much yourself. I thought we agreed. You have the present, she gets the future.”
“And your past nobody gets.”
“The past is irrelevant. And it is endless. It is Raymond Carver country. Believe me, I’ve lived it and there’s nothing left to add but more kitsch and clichés. And one leads to the next and then I would be telling Madeleine as I am telling you now that my mother died in an institution and it would become a refrain for us, for her and me, for me and you. It is endless and it is meaningless. It is not what I am. It can never … define me.” He grates this out. This surprises him, how difficult.
And precisely because they do not have much time left and because it is all meaningless he sings her the whole folk aria, the old ancestral blood song, the white trash anthem. The poached deer and trailer courts, the violence and squalor, the UI fiddles and odometer swindles. The runaways. How his mother would stop at the roadside with the boy and her suitcases and sit down to sketch … trees sometimes, mountains mostly. Ordinary pencil, lined notepads. And it was usually there, in a ditch with her sketchbook on her knees, but sometimes in a motel somewhere, that they would find her. Usually with the boy, but a few times she ran on her own. Mostly his father found her. The Mounties, if she got far enough. The last time, she seemed to know they were coming for her, as though this time she herself might have phoned. She had packed him a little bag and fixed herself up. She helped him with his shoes though he was almost nine. She told him his father would be there soon.
But the father was already there, waiting in a hotel bar just down the street. Until the thing was done. See the stone cold eyes over a row of boilermakers and tomato juice.
She slicked down the boy’s hair and kissed his forehead. They sat waiting on the bed, side by side. When still no one had come, she got him up to wash his hands in the sink. She seemed to be listening for them to pull up front but they were slow in coming. She kept washing his hands, kept washing them. Until he was crying and scared, until they were raw, until they bled. When the men finally came she almost ran to the door, to open for them. To these men who would find a place for her. And there, it would come as a relief to be who she was and what. And for a few years he took long bus rides to see her there, who she was and what.
He and this girl head south on the highway. So much noisier, he notices, in a convertible, even with the top up. The wipers’ weary chug and caw, the rain’s spatter on sodden canvas, the tires’ slick hiss, a scouring roar through pools here and there collected in the road. Pop songs low on the radio, too low to bother turning off. He switches on the headlights, to feel the glow seep from the dash.
She sits facing him now, knees drawn up under her chin, her back against the door. He wonders if it is locked, wonders i
f he wants it to be. Though he has not asked, she tells him about her last trip to Mexico. When she was thirteen. Her stepfather taking her there alone. Feeding her obsession for gaining news of a father widely believed dead. The casual mention of a small community from Galicia, resettled now near Mexico City. Old neighbours, one or two childhood friends who would have old stories of him. She knew the price, what the trip would cost her.
She has hinted at this before, and at something with her brother. The only person in her family she speaks of tenderly. Before today he has passed over these veiled mentions, taking them as something fashionable, confessed by girls these days to make them appear embattled, dramatic. He has passed over this because his awakened contempt would have made it so much more difficult to continue with her. He is surprised now to be telling himself that it doesn’t really matter, how much of this is true. After what he’s just told her and not told her, he can still say this. And at the same time he is scanning a highway sign—luminescent green in the headlights and glittering in the late afternoon rain. Pincher Creek, already. The story is true for her in some way, and like most everything else, untrue in others.
As he takes the road for the Crowsnest Pass she looks back. “Pincher Creek. You wanted to stay the night …” He tells her now that he was born here.
In a few minutes they will swing north and angle back and up towards Calgary through the Kananaskis Valley, over a new highway that threads along the empty east slope of the Rockies. Next fuel stop: 144 k. / 90 mi.
When he was a child, this drive was an adventure, a string of doglegs up little secondary roads, the 517 and the 940. Thirty years later, it is a late Saturday afternoon in early May and it feels like an adventure again. So many weekend getaways since then, but this feels … the intimacy is of quite another kind, an adventure more dangerous. This is a fresh topic, interesting to him.
Steady rain, approaching dark. Mountains veiled in cloud, the wetted grain, matte density of rock. The greens of trees richer in the mist. The new blacktop engulfs the headlights, casts light back in concentrated arcs and bursts of gold.
He is only half aware of taking her somewhere she has never been with him. Home. Not hers but his. When they get back to the city it is almost midnight. He shuts the headlights off half a block from home and coasts the remaining distance in the dark. This is the night that made everything possible that should not be.
They stand naked before one another, and for an instant, just the briefest of instants, maybe he does see her. In his wife’s bedroom, next to their bed. Queen for a day. Who could it hurt.
What followed was a night that should never have happened. A night that became two full days behind drawn blinds. This I can’t quite forgive. I think she came to feel this also, that there must be a reckoning, for things I should never—she should never have let herself do, to a woman she had never met. For putting on clothing not hers, for touching things. Items in our night table I cannot bring myself to list. Thinking of this now I feel a kind of panic—disbelief, the briefest flicker of voiceless denial, as the precious vessel slips from the child’s fingers and shatters at his feet—
I did this.
At some point late on the first night she said as though in answer, though I hadn’t said a word, “I believe you, about your mother. A lie, here, would be too ugly.”
And in that one line I sensed everything she thought me capable of.
But I had not told her everything, so she was not wrong about this. Put yourself for a moment in my place. Perhaps you do not want to. I understand you. Try, just for a moment. The moment when you understand she was right all along, that you have been wanting to end it, that ending it is more important now than ever. Something new and dangerous is happening. You’ve done things, anything to poison it, but it will not die on its own. End it.
But that moment comes and just as quickly goes, and you tell yourself: Next time, I’ll tell her next time.
Next time to tell the truth will be that much harder.
The next few times you see her, you wonder why you are going out of your way to be cruel. Tell her, yes, but after we’ve fucked….
Cruel in ways you’ve never had to be with the others. You think of it now as your summer of cruelty. But was that cruelty an exaction for what you have told her about yourself, or for what each succeeding failure to break it off teaches you? About yourself, your weakness, your cowardice. Your rage, not hers.
Banff, you’ll take her up there for her birthday. Revenge for Madeleine’s selfish pregnancy is just a pretext now. August, just a few weeks more. Ten or twelve more weeks, of cruelty in between. You’ll do it there.
And then in Banff, because it’s easier, for you, you let her break it off for you. Just like all the other young women, and not like them at all. You will watch but pretend not to see her sever you like a limb, the authentic pain of a last phantom attachment to the world. Or, her last but one. There’s still her brother Gavin.
DIET JOURNAL
Date: 31 Aug. 1994
MOOD: low to normal
WEIGHT: 47.1 kilos
BREAKFAST: hot lemon water, cayenne, olive oil, 3/4 Kit Kat, 5 grapefruit seeds
LUNCH: tea, 2 1/4 Kit Kat, 1 cinnamon Danish
SUPPER: 1 sausage roll, 1 cheese Danish, tonic and vinegar, tea, Kit Kat
SNACK: 3 bran muffins with cream cheese, 1 box of Triscuits, bran cereal, olives, cinnamon toast (4) with brown sugar, sardines, Cheezies, beef jerky
LAXATIVES: 102, plus 13 at 2 A.M.
REMARKS: Not too bad a day. Snacked till 1:30 A.M. Laxatives ineffective. Had to get it all back up. Slept. Many dreams. Try again with exercise in A.M.
PALACE OF THE INTESTINES
In the first, the world outside, the surf of the sea, spirals inward: the shell is the house of echoes. In the second, the interior life, the ideas and angelic intelligences, open out into the firmament in glowing and radiant configurations … Two emblems and a double movement that unfolds or draws back into itself. The echo spirals into the shell until it becomes silence; or, trumpeted forth…. it becomes fame and the distortions of fame, gossip and slander. Or it ascends to become a hymn: music is a kind of starry sky that we hear but do not see … The reflection rises and reassembles in the mysterious order of the constellations, silent music we see but do not hear.
OCTAVIO PAZ
IF I CAN FIND LITTLE TO EXCERPT from Beulah’s diaries for most of 1994, there are two reasons. The first: that virtually nothing happens, in the way of events or human contact. The second, and related to the first: that much of what she has written verges on incoherence. Monkeys at typewriters. I take no pleasure in saying this. It is not until she leaves for Mexico toward the end of that year that I can pick up the trail again. And by then, what her Sor Juana had been through had left her also much changed.
Beulah’s labyrinth research had given me fresh horizons to explore, but by the time I read in her journals where the work was taking her, it was too late to intervene. It is also true that by then I wouldn’t have tried—but as she was writing them in ’94 I could have helped, or gotten her help. Maybe the best that can be said was that we had once crossed paths in the corridors, and for the briefest time we might have helped one another.
For more than two years she’d laboured to draw nearer her quarry, to feel what she felt, know what she knew, to think her thoughts. Two years of struggling over an incline so slight as to render any upward progress imperceptible, then, just ahead a sudden vista like a door opening onto the sea. In the work of Octavio Paz, Beulah detects an echo, a reflection of a formulation that carries her forward through her own research like a mantra: swallow the world….
The following would be, incredibly enough, high ground for Beulah, from which she could look back over her struggles, her furies and frustrations, her sacrifices.
[7 Sept. 1994]
It’s HERE—in Paz, everything I’ve been looking for. Thank you O Paz!—poetic dialectic: sky = visual hymn; hymn = audible sky. Ju
ana in her cell—her books instruments collected—she reads and listens … inward ear tuned to an audible sky. Echoes incast, winding ever more tightly down to silence. She writes, whispers verses, her eyes scan the outcast sky for hymns. Reads like no one has ever read swallows the boundaries splitting her from a sky of promises … writes in ink an echo distillate, turns inside out, lungs ovaries diaphragm, fallopian tuba—the instrument of our fallibility our fall—dispersed, immersed, dissolved a squid in ink projected. Swallow and integrate or be digested. Dissolute. Assimilate. Double-headed dialectic that civilizes as it kills. Dog Head thrown back howling at a sky of mirrors—high hyena whine, o hymnal hyenae—you’ll never get enough never know enough never love be loved enough—then Ox Head rips you deep down low / spills coral entrails across a marble floor of echoes….
From time to time I find myself rereading passages such as these. One must after all try to imagine Beulah happy. But as on previous occasions, the happy moment was brief, a sense of triumph even at the turning point of defeat. The ground was never solid beneath her, struggling as she did to each sand dune’s crest only to stare out over countless others, over endless ranks of barren breakers, stacked monuments to the wind.
I cannot help seeing Beulah hunched over her notebook, scabbed knuckles whitening around a pencil stub, blinds drawn against the day, the room’s strew and scatter of books, junk food wrappers and encrusted plates more squalid in the gloom….
If youth is not wasted on the young, surely ambition is.6 She had been determined to run every lead to ground, every allusion, every reference, every myth along the way. Yet even if from the outset she’d recognized the objective for what it was—the virtual sum of human knowledge—still this might have been insufficient to discourage her. At any rate, Beulah finds her method of approach bringing her time and again to the brink of an abyss of complexity beyond her human grasp.
In a chapter devoted to First Dream Octavio Paz initiates Beulah in the vast literature on the ‘voyage of the soul’ and medieval dream theory … Paz on Sor Juana’s greatest work:
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