The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Right,” said the teacher with a slight bow to the interpreter. “Thank you. Thorough and eloquent.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’m a writer. I can appreciate that. But you could at least show that you understand. You don’t need to have him translate every little thing we say. Don’t you see, there’s something not right about it. .. . Oh, if you don’t see then I can’t explain it.”

  He smiled. “For unity and smooth.”

  “Consistency,” put in the interpreter.

  “Ah, yes,” I said.

  “Laura, enough this stupidness of words. Important what happened to the husband. And you.”

  “He was a reporter. ...” I told the whole thing, the police helicopter, the shooting, the neck wounds, the hospital, the blue shirt, the grand jury, while the two stood frowning and shaking their heads. Even the interpreter cared, I could see. He was a person, too.

  “Terrible. I wish to say more but in the English as you demand I have no right words. I feel very bad for you.”

  “Thank you. You can’t say it any better than that.”

  “Me too,” said the interpreter.

  “Thank you.”

  “Any help needed please ask. A valued student.” He handed me a card. “You should return before.”

  “You know why I didn’t? I was afraid you would tell me to invest in loss. Or that I should have no complaints whatsoever. Something like that.”

  “You crazy? Your husband killed and I tell you not grieve? These which I teach are things in books. ...”

  He struggled for a word and finally turned in irritation to the interpreter, who said, “Parables.”

  “Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.”

  “Woe? That’s a pretty good word. You have a lot of potential. Woe. Yes, well, it’s interesting that you see it that way.”

  “Time for class. Laura, you are not telling the secret?”

  I laughed. “Oh, all right. It’s a little foolish, though, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe a lot foolish, but how I do.”

  “One more thing, while we’re at it. How old are you?”

  “Forty-three. Why?”

  “I was curious. So you’re just like us.” Not a well-preserved hundred and ten, I meant, or a precocious seventeen.

  As he spoke in Chinese, even his posture seemed to change. “I never said otherwise,” the interpreter translated. Then, “Continue,” he called, and the groups broke apart, the students assembled.

  “Head erect and suspended from heaven, feet rooted in the earth, arms carrying the ball of energy. Breath thin, long, quiet and slow. Move as if you’re drawing silk from a cocoon, never breaking the thread.” He was the master again.

  THERE WAS Q., of course, settling in with his suitcase and groceries not long after the funeral. To take care of me, he said. (Except on Jilly’s weekend when I made him leave, in case she turned up.) He came, he cooked, he was full of labors, like Lear’s faithful Kent, whom I’d seen him play memorably.

  “Head erect and suspended from heaven, feet rooted in the earth, arms carrying the hall of energy. Breath thin, long, quiet and slow. Move as if you’re drawing silk from a cocoon, never breaking the thread.”

  He even danced and made me dance. Imagine. On my husband’s grave, practically.

  Nonsense, said Q. We’ve always danced, don’t you remember? We’re just doing our thing.

  He put on a sexy reggae tape and started dancing by himself, twirling, snapping his fingers, exaggerating his hips and shoulders to make me laugh. He looked so unabashed and silly all alone that I got up to join him, and soon we were jiggling and slithering around the living room. I thought of how my great-aunt Bess, close to eighty with knees so stiff from arthritis that some days she could barely walk, nonetheless at my cousin Joyce’s first wedding rose from her chair like a Lady Lazarus, hooked her cane along its back and inched to the dance floor on the groom’s arm, where she kicked up her feet and stepped nimbly across the polished wood, shaking her hips and mighty shoulders while he did his shy best to follow. As a young girl she had been famous for her dancing, and at last I could see why. Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breathe in the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body’s song, and Bess sang. Years fell from her, her pinned-up white hair fell, until Joyce and all the others ceased their own dancing to clap and urge her on, as if the collective will could keep her song from ending. She stopped abruptly between beats, glued to the floor, overtaken by stiffness. “Okay, enough already with the dancing. I’ll pay for this tomorrow.” Hobbling toward her chair on the arm of the groom, she aged instantly, as if the edge of the dance floor were the border of Shangri-La.

  How did she do it, I’d always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought—for when we realize we’re actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.

  I can’t believe I’m dancing, I said to Q. Am I really? Is this me?

  Don’t believe it, don’t spoil it, just keep doing it.

  And we did, until we collapsed on the couch.

  I can’t imagine dancing now. But it could happen that one morning before the little blue cells are fully awake, a good dance tune will come on the radio and my hips will start twitching. Soon I’ll be dancing around the kitchen as I used to do, for the sheer pleasure of it, until I remember I’m sick for reasons I can’t sort out and maybe shouldn’t even try to: this can’t be me dancing.

  After a while Q. went away, like the wind, blowing as it listeth. The time wasn’t right, anyway. Much too soon. What did I feel? Grateful, hateful. Did I want him to stay or go? Neither, both, I don’t know. I wanted the intervening years not to have happened. I wanted us to be other than what those years had made of us, or we of them.

  4

  Much as I want to have lunch with Q. (not least because I’m curious to see what he’ll come up with—he’s as ingenious in the kitchen as he is ingratiating in the bedroom), it appears, after the morning Tai Chi class, that I will not move anymore today or perhaps ever again. My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover’s croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I’ll make you, don’t resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch. . . . Every cell yearns for that voluptuous embrace. Why deny myself?

  I lower myself onto the bed, sinking as a stone sinks, then slowly bring my legs up over the edge and lie back. Once my aching shoulders hit the mattress the ache turns sweet. Ah, the relief, the luxury of not having to bear my own weight. At a time I never expected it, life has sent me another great love. I no longer care whether I’ll ever hoist myself up to visit Q., or write about the seaside town, inventing benign intrigues for the Wire Inspector, the Tree Warden, the Oil Spill Coordinator, the Shellfish Constable. . . .

  I don’t feel like sleeping, though. I’ve been awake only a couple of hours. A flick of a switch on the bedside radio summons the vibrations of the universe. Often I pretend the sounds riding the airwaves are for me alone; they offer personally designed little messages in the form of music or news, chance comments, snatches of interviews. Now the sound of a solitary violin trickles out, making a long, cajoling speech. It’s taking time off from its orchestral duties to develop an ascending theme, an extended narrative, a message of . . . what? Hope? Cheer? No, more like complexity and patience. The complexity of patience. The need for it. It sounds like a voice addressing the blue ether, or soothing an injured child. My morning news. It carries me into the melody, lulling me to a half-conscious state in which only my ear is awake.

  When it’s over, I find I can move. I switch off the weather report—hot, hot, hot—and inspired by the violin
, put on a tape of Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate. Slip on sandals, comb my hair, make the little motions of preparation while the music’s splendor reminds me that somewhere people have reason to exult and jubilate, and before I know it I’m walking down the broad way, Broadway arrayed for summer with crowds of vendors: the street is a vast carnival, a performance, the stage set with books, bracelets, rows of sunglasses reflecting dozens of suns, racks of cotton dresses skimming on a breeze, pyramids of oranges and dark avocados, oh, life is abundant. I stop to buy red grapes and fancy cookies for Q. since he’s fussing over lunch, then descend into the subway.

  My mind may be dulled but my senses are abnormally alert, and the subway chafes each one in turn. First the eyes: a world of grays. The walls are creamy gray and the floors dark, dust making them soft as suede. The trains are steely gray, the papers at the newsstand pale and wilted. All the faces and clothes dissolve in grayness. The passengers truly look like mourners going about under the streets. The roar of the train erupts out of the long pit, spilling onto the platform like audible lava held in check by the gray walls. At the far end of the car I enter, some unseen but surely gray person has a box blasting heavy gray music. No one suggests he turn it off. People have been killed for less. We’re savvy, we’re grateful he has the box to advertise his rage. Across the aisle a toddler in a stroller drops his pacifier, wails, and his child-mother swats him across the head. Here comes a beggar—another kind of performance artist—delivering a robotized soliloquy about his plight. Three teenage girls giggle hysterically and yank at each other’s frizzed hair, while the old man next to them snores. Warm impersonal thighs press on either side, compacting me. The air smells of grime, sweat, plus something remotely, rancidly burning—probably one of the dozens of fires on the tracks each day. A few yards off, a stuporous man sprawls on three seats; the passengers have left a discreet space around the smell rising from steamy sores on his shins. My tongue tastes bitter. I swallow hard and study the ads but they’re not much distraction. For the most part, they’re exhortations to health, as if the whole city were stubbornly sick, a vast hospital where individual immune systems conspire against the body politic. Ads for acne doctors, for bunion doctors, for anal fissure and hemorrhoid doctors, for hernia doctors; ads for gynecological clinics, for family counseling, for psychiatric services; ads urging a test for HIV, ads for condoms (“If you’re going to play around, play with condoms”—a photo of merry teenagers tossing inflated condoms like balloons); ads for detox programs—“When You’re Ready to Get Off Your High Horse,” appropriate for Ev’s dealers up in the Bronx. And many more. There’s metaphor, I could tell Grace. Not a moment too soon, I climb back out into the clean heat of the sun, my little spurt of jubilation all fizzled out. I can’t remember the sound of Mozart or why the soprano exulted.

  The walk to Peter’s apartment leads through a construction site lined with trucks and dumpsters. It’s looked this way for years, as I recall, heaped with rubble and chunks of concrete. Hard to tell if they’re building up or tearing down. An elevator bearing a load of caged workers creakily ascends the scaffolding. Since the street is impassable, I slink through a narrow plywood walkway plastered with a row of identical posters showing a gun aimed straight at me, then emerge into a crowd of men in hard hats, their drills set aside as they lounge on the sidewalk, eating lunch.

  “My wife didn’t make my lunch,” one man says to his companions, “and she took her pocketbook with her, so I couldn’t get any money....” I’m out of earshot for the rest, but it makes me wonder again what Q. will come up with, maybe something Italian. I wonder, too, whether he might have attached some innocent woman to himself, a woman soon to be innocent no more. Over the past ten years or so, when Q. has fallen in love, I’ve been gnawed by jealousy yet felt supremely safe. His energies were occupied, he would stop preying on me like a Siren with his voice, his conversation, his repertoire of pungent lines from dramatic literature. Stop asking me to write a play with a role for him. Wouldn’t that be marvelous, Laura—voice booming, face beaming, shedding his fireworks—a play by you with me starring? Oh, yes, he’d like that. I don’t write plays, I told him over and over. I like to write the stuff in between the dialogue. The narrative, we call it.

  Q. greets me with open arms and I sink into them, more from fatigue than love. We do our special kiss, the between-friends-and-lovers kiss. Handy, since we never quite know, these days, how the occasion will turn out. It’s almost like an equation in algebra: will the product of passion times affinity prove greater than that of remorse times resentment? Aside from any possible love in Q.’s errant life, the new unknown today is my exhaustion. That can probably outweigh any other factor.

  He waves his arm at the surroundings: half-packed cartons, mounds of books, shoes and pots.

  We’ll go out, he says, somewhere close. I just couldn’t manage to get lunch together in this mess.

  I look around, think it over, judge. He’s right, I’m always judging him, deciding whether or not to take offense and mark his permanent record card. The apartment is a shambles; the chaise I like so much is piled with stuffed shopping bags; anyone would be hard put to move around in that kitchen. Okay, exonerated this time. I needn’t have bothered stopping for the fancy cookies and grapes, though, which I hand him without a word.

  How lovely. Thank you, cara. We’ll come back and eat them later. Listen, do you remember that little Mexican place we once ate in? We had such a good time there, didn’t we?

  I look at him in shock. Yes, we did, I agree.

  We could get a cab and be there in ten minutes.

  No, I say. I don’t want to go back there.

  How can he even think of it? Something special happened there. Truth. Clarity. Even if they’ve since receded, the memory has to be kept pristine. But not, it seems, for Q. He lives for the moment. He wants an exhilarating experience. Even a warmed-over revival would do. The motherfucker just wants an experience.

  Not back there, I repeat.

  All right, never mind.

  We walk in the opposite direction from the construction, so I never learn what happened to the man whose wife didn’t make his lunch. Had I known how things would turn out, I could have given him the grapes and cookies. After a block and a half, there’s a café with tables and colorful umbrellas outside, crowded with jolly young people dressed mostly in black. To Q., who was a small child during the war, black shirts mean Fascists. His shirts are white or striped. Without consulting, we step inside, where it’s dark, cool, and empty except for a middle-aged blond woman washing glasses at the bar.

  Anywhere you like, she waves. We sit in a corner. A waitress appears, dressed in black, too—short skirt, spindly legs, blue and orange spiked hair.

  “Love your hair,” says Q.

  “Thanks. Do you want to hear the specials?”

  For Q., a hot roast beef sandwich with trimmings and for me, a green salad.

  A few leaves of lettuce? he asks. That’s all?

  I can’t eat anything heavy. It upsets my stomach.

  So tell me what’s wrong.

  I make short work of that subject. Yes, he claims I could never bore him, but listing symptoms is certainly walking the edge. It bores me, at any rate. Besides, speaking takes too much effort. Sitting upright is effort enough.

  Have you been to a doctor? he asks. I want you to go to a good doctor and get this checked out. I really mean it, Laura.

  I’m going, Q. I have an appointment.

  If I get him talking, I can rest and nibble on my greens, lulled by the spell of his words, his voice. And with a small prod, hardly more than How’ve you been? How are the children?, he’s off and running.

  The girls are fine, he reports. Graduate school, jobs, travel, marriage. His second youngest, Renata, is even pregnant again and this time she’ll keep it.

  Mostly I’ve been alone a lot, he says. I love it. It’s wonderful, being alone. Do you know, I think that after everything, I’ll probably end up alo
ne.

  (Everything: we know what that means. Including me? Am I part of everything? I was the first, the one who jolted his settled life and launched him on this picaresque career.)

  It struck me the last time Ann left me, he says. Remember Ann? You do know she came out to stay with me? That lasted six weeks.

  Of course I know. Remember I called while she was there and you couldn’t really talk and then you called me back later from the theatre?

  Oh, yes, he says. Oh, yes—assaulting his open roast beef sandwich with gusto, washing it down with sips of beer. Well, he goes on, so she left again. Again we decided it wouldn’t work. She was going back to the commune. I drove—

  The commune? I didn’t know there were any left.

  Sure, there are quite a few.

  What kind of commune?

  Q. hesitates. Could he be embarrassed? This was a women’s commune, he says, in California.

  I almost laugh, but manage not to. I don’t believe it, I say. Do you mean she was choosing between that or you?

  He shrugs. I didn’t set up the alternatives, Laura. It wasn’t my idea to live together. It was hers. She got hung up on it. It put me in a ridiculous position, as you see. If she chose the commune, as in fact she did in the end, it wouldn’t be good for my self-esteem, to say the least.

  Not an easy choice, I comment.

  Thank you, my love. So where was I? Dunque... I drove her to the airport. I came back to my apartment. I walked through the rooms. I looked in the closets. Her clothes were all gone. I lay down on my bed and took a long nap. I got up and took a long bath. I played a tape. Mendelssohn, I think it was. I read a book. It was wonderful.

  I laugh. He’s entertaining. No pain at all in Q.’s loving solitude. I like it, too.

  I saw her once more after that, he says. She called a few weeks later in semi-hysterics so I flew out to meet her in Santa Monica for the weekend. I stayed in a motel near the beach. We had lunch and sat for hours on a patio overlooking the Pacific, watching the dolphins. It’s warm there all the time, you know. Those people don’t know what suffering is. No wonder the movie industry started in Southern California. It could never have happened in Minneapolis. Anyway, we sat talking for so long we almost forgot to go to my motel for the obligatory half hour of making love. She told me astonishing things. Her parents didn’t let her speak at the dinner table. They said it would do her good to listen to adult conversation. They also had silent evenings a couple of times a week. They were clearing or perhaps it was cleansing their minds.