The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  No.

  Do you want to?

  No. I don’t know. I’m not sure.

  You don’t still blame me for that? You know a miscarriage doesn’t happen that. . .

  No, of course not.

  What’s the matter? Why are you so quiet? Speak to me. Tell me things. Anything. I want to hear you speak. Is your husband around, is that it?

  No, it’s that a rat just ran across the window ledge.

  A rat? So what? He was on his way somewhere.

  It distracted me. I’m starting a new book. It’s about a child.

  I told him all about the book. As I spoke, its shape began to work itself out, the way a shape in a developing photograph gradually dislodges itself from the void of the background. All I would need to do now was write it down. Because he listened and concentrated, the book took shape. It would be a good book, I could tell, and I rejoiced. With Q. I could do anything.

  It sounds wonderful. Write it down just the way you told it to me and it will be perfect, he said.

  I know.

  Silence.

  Sometimes, he said, I think we made a terrible mistake. Or I did.

  Yes, you did. Maybe not me.

  Is it too late?

  I don’t know. I think so.

  (But I thought the opposite: No, come back, carry me off. Don’t ask, just do it. You ask so that I’ll release you. But it’s you who have the spell. Or is it? Who keeps us this way?)

  Don’t say that. It makes me unhappy, he said.

  You’ve earned it. Till next time.

  I think of you.

  I hung up and sat for a long time looking at the river. Finally I walked to the window ledge and saw that in a corner, the rat, or maybe rats, had built a small nest of twigs and hair and lint and ivy leaves. I’d have to clear it away. Not now, the rat might still be in the vicinity. Tomorrow.

  Ev came in and paced about, taking a break.

  “There’s a rat’s nest on the ledge, Ev. I saw a rat run across just a few minutes ago.”

  “Are you sure it was a rat? Maybe it was a squirrel.”

  I looked at him with bitterness. Q. never doubted me. “I’m sure. I can tell the difference. It had a thin curly tail.”

  “Sounds like a rat, then.” There was no danger that he would ask who was on the phone. He rarely asked me personal questions.

  Early the next morning while Ev slept, I got up and put on rubber gloves. Remembering Q. on the phone, I swept the rat’s nest into a plastic bag, tied it securely and dropped it in the kitchen garbage can. Ev would take down the garbage. He always did. I suspect his mother trained him, for he seemed to regard the garbage as his particular responsibility, like a dutiful child. After I was done I washed my hands of the rat.

  I NEVER READ the paper on the night of the wrong Chinese dinner, but went back to bed after a while and fit my body against Tim’s. A cooling wind was rising off the river. When I woke it was almost nine—too late for the Tai Chi class—and I was alone. I thought I recalled Tim kissing me good-bye but I wasn’t sure. It might have been a dream, or a memory of some other morning or other kiss. Time no longer feels like a fluid medium carrying the world along, but has become the collapsible, teasing dimension scientists say it truly is. This morning’s kiss or some other kiss wasn’t the important distinction it once was (though whose kiss still mattered as much as ever). Nor do sleep and waking feel like very different states: they drift close and merge like clouds, blurring boundaries. I walk sleepily through the apartment, and asleep in my ardent bed I dream of writing: long passages about the seaside town where life is, or seems, simpler and more manageable than in the city, the book I’m writing for solace and as a kind of quest, a book for Ev. A book of more words, maybe, than we ever spoke together. I work out intrigues between the characters, little hurts and betrayals, secret loves among the librarians and schoolteachers and fishermen, the Moth Agent, the Constable, the Surveyor of Lumber, the Town Hall Janitor and the one Social Worker. Trysts and confrontations. None of this can I remember when I wake. Sometimes it feels pleasant to have sleep and waking no longer opposite states, just as it was pleasant to discover, as I grew up, that many accepted dichotomies are false: passion and reason, flesh and spirit. But this merging was not the product of mature wisdom. Sleep and waking are different. This was just one more symptom.

  On the kitchen counter was a note from Tim. The only other evidence of his passage was the clean glass, the plate he must have used for toast, and the coffee mug resting in the dish rack. His notes to me while I sleep are businesslike, telegraphic; he’s used to dealing with secretaries. “Took the bumper to attach on my way, also your screwdriver, just in case. Dinner with clients tonight, I’ll phone when I get home, probably late. Call doctor. XXX Tim.” In style they compare poorly with Ev’s; Ev was, after all, a writer. Could he see me from on high he might feel some slight shame that I was seeing a man with no writing style to speak of. It wouldn’t help to cite Tim’s intelligence and many virtues. To Ev, the notes would be conclusive.

  I switched on the radio, my lifeline. No television—I could make my own images. What I needed in the empty house was sounds, voices. Something sprightly and Baroque filled the air with the humming vibrations of the universe. Still there, beyond my private fog.

  Then I called the doctor Ev used to see and made an appointment for two weeks off, the earliest they could fit me in. The moment I put the phone down I felt sicker—weak, achy, lost in mist—as if by making the appointment I had granted reality to the illness. It felt more like some evil spell, though. Could Q. be nearby, perhaps at Peter’s place in Chelsea, his spirit inhaling and sucking in my energy, that old black magic turned malignant with too much use? I hoped not, for his sake as much as mine, poor Q. He never intended any harm. A prince of a man.

  From the front window I could see the Tai Chi class breaking up into small groups in the park below, the teacher and the interpreter walking off together as always. I checked the side window ledge. As I’d feared, the squirrel was back, nestled in a mound of dried ivy twigs and leaves. His body looked unusually hunched, even for a squirrel. My taps on the screen sent a wave of shudders over his rounded back, yet he didn’t skitter away. Couldn’t, or didn’t care any more, or both. He simply peered over his shoulder, showing a beady eye. Did he see me, and if so, what did the sight signify to him? I kicked but not too hard, for fear of breaking the screen: what if he climbed into the living room and settled in? I shuddered, too.

  WHEN I DRAGGED MYSELF OUT TO MOVE MY CAR, Luke was leaning into the open hood of his polished maroon Cadillac with the sober, absorbed air of men inspecting their engines. Just as I was about to speak, he straightened up and turned. Like the Tai Chi teacher, he can sense people approaching from behind; it’s a matter of feeling vibrations.

  “I’m doing okay,” he replied to my greeting, “specially now that I have a fine woman like you to rest my old eyes on.”

  So it was that mood. You never knew. He was quixotic: now preoccupied with business and now paternal; angry at some local injustice or, bound for church Sunday mornings, gravely dapper. I appreciated his flirtatious mode though I was aware that Jilly and her friends would roll their eyes. Unless they’d find it acceptable on the grounds of cultural diversity.

  I smiled wanly. “Something wrong with your car?”

  “Nah, I’m just looking like I’m tinkering with it because they’s giving out tickets early today. They ain’t got no mercy lately.”

  “It must be because the city is broke. They’re trying to raise money.”

  “The city is broke? Well, we’s all broke,” he commented. Luke never looks broke, though, especially on Sundays in his double-breasted gray suit and gray fedora, ushering his three-generational, elegantly dressed family into the Cadillac. It was in this guise that I met him years ago when I was a newcomer to the block. He introduced himself formally and shook hands. Stocky, black, mustached, winning. Mid-fifties or so. (Over sixty, he confided later on.
) The local community leader, possibly? Unnervingly good-looking, whatever he was. Days later I saw him in his navy blue super’s garb. He also minds cars, that is, moves them from one side of the street to the other at the appointed hours—a thriving business with weekly cash payments; his belt hangs heavy with keys. On most streets this complex auto dance is anarchic, every man for himself, but on ours it’s masterminded, as strict as a minuet.

  “I saw your boyfriend putting the bumper back on this morning.”

  “Yes, that was a new wrinkle. He found it lying on the ground. Did you see anyone back into me, by any chance?”

  “You know I’da rung your bell if I had, Laura. I was away for a while, had to bring my car in to check the carburetor. These strangers come by, don’t know how to parallel park.”

  “So, you said the cops are lurking?”

  “Just round the bend. You better sit in it for a while, it’s still early. You’re lookin’ mighty sweet today.”

  “Thanks. You don’t look so bad yourself.”

  “Ah, I’m an old fellow now. You shoulda seen me forty, fifty years ago.”

  I wished I had. Luckily, halfway up the street, a history professor from next door was just pulling out in a very respectable Chrysler. When he saw me he waved and waited. We locals have developed a sensitivity to the gait of people scurrying to move their cars, one of those traits nurtured by environmental demands. I waved back gratefully and moved as fast as I could. How were his wife and daughter, I wondered. Months ago, he’d told me they had some mysterious illness. An epidemic? He looked cheerful enough, so they were probably still alive. I must bear that in mind. I found the bumper securely fastened, looking as if it had never left its post.

  Once more to bed, compliant as a milk-filled infant put down for her afternoon nap, as a besotted bride gently nudged yet again onto the mattress. Suddenly came the high-pitched beep of a truck backing up. Like a metronome it beeped with murderous precision, the sound waves oozing through my skin, setting every cell pulsing in response like an audience clapping in rhythm. The beep became my heartbeat, pulsebeat, bloodbeat. Like the muted cooing of pigeons, the electronic beep has something of the toneless, sneakered approach of death. “Man goeth to his long home,” read a graveyard inscription Ev showed me up on the Cape, “and the mourners goeth about the streets.” The beep was their dirge. My flesh beeped, my skin beeped, I was distilled to a mere echo, and after a while I didn’t even long for it to stop. I was wedded to the pain of it, and wonder of wonders, I fell asleep in it and dreamed in it. Q. dreams.

  DREAMS BROKEN CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT by the phone. My parents down in Florida in an overturned car, my father’s precious glasses shattered? Shouldn’t they be tucked in by now, watching Arsenio? I reached out a sandbag arm and picked up.

  “Hi, Laura.”

  “Jilly!” I hadn’t felt that spurt of love at the sound of a voice for some time. “Where are you?”

  “Let me see. If it’s Tuesday this must be . . . Seattle. Yes, I’m pretty sure. I’m in my friend Chrissie’s apartment, I know that much.”

  She was spending the summer going through the country by train and, I feared, hitchhiking, stopping wherever she had friends from college, or friends of friends. Why? To see. To flee. To stay in motion.

  “So what’s it like, all alone on a train? Do you talk to people?”

  “It’s great. I’ve been all over. Colorado, Montana, Washington. I’ve met lots of people, though there are some you’d rather not talk to, if you know what I mean. Some people are, like, too friendly?”

  “I hope you know how to take care of yourself.”

  “Oh, it’s not that. It’s not men. Most of the men are with their wives anyway, and they’re old couples, fifty, sixty. They want to take care of me, you know? What’s a young girl like me—that’s what they call me, a young girl, like I was six—doing traveling all by herself? One couple from Wyoming wanted to take me home with them. Then for about three days there was this other old couple sitting behind me. The man was compelled to say everything twice. ‘Colorado sure is beautiful,’ he would say to his wife. ‘Yup, Colorado sure is beautiful.’ In the morning when everyone’s getting up: ‘Honey, have you seen my razor? Honey, have you seen my razor?’ And then after he came back from shaving, ‘Just look at that bridge! Will you just look at that bridge!’ By the time we reached California I was so exasperated I wanted to turn around and say to him, ‘Must you repeat everything twice? Must you repeat everything twice?’ Anyway, in San Francisco I met my friend Barry. I met my friend Barry. He had his father’s car. He had his father’s car. We went—”

  “Stop!” I laughed. “Enough! Enough!”

  “Actually, this guy gave me an idea for a performance piece we could do in the fall at school. Take a play, any well-known play, say, Hamlet or A Streetcar Named Desire, and perform it with all the lines done twice. After every line there’d be this echo from offstage that would represent, sort of, how after the actor speaks the line, it echoes in the audience’s mind? What do you think of that?”

  “I think it could take an awfully long time.”

  “Oh, we’d have a food break, you know, sell sandwiches in between or something,” she said blithely.

  “Or you could do it with a simultaneous translation into some other language, so it becomes a bilingual version. The way they do with sign language for the deaf.”

  “Except no one knows languages anymore. Though that might make it even better. So how are you doing, Laura?”

  I told her the truth, the whole truth, complete with fevers and chills and all the rest.

  “Oh, you poor thing. That’s awful.”

  Ah, joy! Barely into my forties and already longing to be mothered by my child. Not technically my child but I like to pretend she is. My feelings are more simple and easy than a true mother’s, and no wonder—I’ve had mostly weekends and summers, the good times. Jilly doesn’t get along very well with her actual mother, which is common enough at nineteen, but I never bad-mouth Margot. It’s not so much decency on my part as pragmatism. Someday they’ll be reconciled, and I don’t want to be rejected in turn as the anti-mother.

  “Aside from the doctor, Laura, you can do a few things for yourself. Don’t smoke, for starters. Eat right. Clean up your act.”

  Jilly was always big on cleaning things up. Even as a small child, when she came to spend weekends with Ev and me she would straighten her room and make the bed on Sundays, leaving hardly a trace. It was as if she wanted us to think her visit only a happy dream, I used to tell him, from which we must wake sadly on Sunday nights. Or maybe she resented his new marriage as much as Tony did, and was making it clear this wasn’t her home. But Ev said ruefully that it was nothing so elaborate, she was just very neat, like her mother.

  “It sounds like you might have one of those chronic fatigue viruses,” she suggested. “Find out about it. First of all, get a book. Go into your local—”

  “Jilly, I know how to get a book. That’s one thing I do know how to do.”

  “A book from a health food store,” she continued. “Don’t do everything the book says, just what appeals to you? Like, don’t give up everything you like to eat. That can be very depressing. For instance, you could go on a macrobiotic diet but I know you, you’d bitch about it and cancel out all the benefits. And while you’re there, buy some stuff for energy. Ginseng. Bee pollen.”

  “Bee pollen?”

  “It’s very good for you.”

  “You sound like a witch.”

  “The Women’s Studies program offers a course in witchcraft but I haven’t taken it yet.”

  “I would think it’d be in the chemistry department. It so happens I was in a health food store a few weeks ago. I was passing by when I got these sudden hunger pangs. I thought if I didn’t eat something that very minute I’d die, so I got a little box of apricot cookies and ripped them open right there. This terrible musty odor rose up, sort of like dried manure. They were the most awful cookie
s I ever had. I can’t imagine what was in them.”

  “That’s because we’re so used to the artificial smells of processed food that we’re turned off by the natural smells. Your hunger is probably hypoglycemia. You have to eat often, in small amounts. Take a banana wherever you go. Listen, Laura, I have a great idea for us. Next month we’ll go up to the Cape. Grandma and Grandpa promised themselves a break from the tourists this year, so they’re going away to some Elder-hostel thing, whatever that is, it sounds like a summer camp for senior citizens, and they want someone to take care of the house. I said I’d do it but my mom doesn’t want me staying up there alone, so this’ll be perfect. Wouldn’t it? Remember all those summers?”

  Her voice caught and stopped, leaving a silence vast with the night breath of mountains and prairies between us. She was thinking, as was I, of the summers we used to spend there on the sandy soil Ev’s family had rooted in for generations, Portuguese immigrants gradually taking on the look and sound of Yankees, losing their men to the sea, and of how her father would plunge the umbrella into the sand as if, like his ancestors, he were staking out a claim, then carry her into deep water and hold her above the waves.

  “The ocean has great healing powers,” she said, recovering herself. “It’s the salt.”

  Yes, that I could believe. And it smells good, too. “It would be lovely. But they haven’t asked me. Maybe they’d feel...” Maybe I’d feel... is what I mean. Ev’s old house, his room, his town, his everything.

  “They’ll feel fine. They would have asked you sooner or later. You know how they leave things to the last minute. I’ll find a waitressing job up there. Or if not I can always pump gas another summer. They hired two extra guys but it’s sure to be busy.” Ev’s parents had a gas station and small convenience store on Route 6. We’d all taken our turns pumping gas. “Come on, say yes. Then I won’t have to stay home with my mother and that wimp she married. He keeps cross-examining me about—”

  “Uh-oh. I don’t like the sound of this, Jilly. I have a feeling your mother won’t like it either.”