“Very interesting,” says the teacher after a pregnant pause. “But not exactly what I was thinking of. Chinese art did make beautiful things, poems, paintings, pottery, all of them with a great deal of empty space. The empty space represents the inner life, what is most important but unseen. Like the breath, which is invisible but sustains us. They say the ancient Tai Chi masters could live on air. Eat air, that is. Of course, I’m sure they preferred food, but in an emergency...” He smiles, but the interpreter doesn’t smile, just keeps translating, as if the teacher is his muse. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Who is whose muse here?
“The space in a bowl, for instance,” he goes on. “You use the clay to make it, and that is the part you see, but what makes the bowl useful is the space within. That metaphor is from Lao-tzu, to give proper credit.”
“Yes, well...” murmurs Grace. “Eating air. And here we’re always dieting. What is the cost of the classes, by the way? I’ve taken four now and haven’t even paid you yet. I assume you’re not giving them as a token of regard.”
“No, unfortunately, here we all have to earn a living. We cannot eat air all the time.”
They step aside to discuss her payment and I head home on sandbag legs, to work. But how can I get to work if I can barely get to my desk with the waiting pages about the idyllic town, rocked by the tides, where Ev grew up? I read over my pages in bed—the house, always the house:
“From the bedroom windows you can see the curving bay a half mile off, shimmering still waters where far out rest the blackened remains of a sunken ship, mast sticking up lonely against the sky. At low tide, when the bay is nothing but mud for a mile or more, parts of the hull are exposed, but at high tide only the mast and a few tips of wood or metal sway in the breeze. The easy way to the bay is to drive down the dirt road to the paved road that cuts through heathery fields and hushed, melancholy marshland, but a better way is to walk the narrow path through the woods, then through open brush tufted with blueberry bushes, gradually becoming sand dunes, and over the dunes to the beach itself, where clumps of black seaweed in orderly rows mark the reach of the tides.”
Even in the bed’s snug embrace I couldn’t grasp the images tight; they whisked through my head like blown dust. Blown by fear.
As I lay back against the pillows, the warm, faintly stale smell of bed—of me in bed—rose up in a little invisible cloud. If it had a color, it would be amber. A homey smell like old-fashioned cooking, roasting meats and sweet pies in farm kitchens, but not quite as fresh. The bed and I smelled slightly overcooked, not yet distasteful. Was it me or the virus, that smell? Or are we one and the same?
Outside, the coming night was cool and uncommonly quiet. I could see the moon rising, also amber, a few gray wisps like stray hairs across its placid, indifferent face. Even with the windows open, the smell gave the room an airless feeling. Better to smell of the red sand in my veins, clean and dry as a desert. Then came the stiffening that used to alarm me so at the beginning. I waited for the sensation to shudder its way along my limbs, and once it passed off, I began very slowly to move through the apartment like a newborn animal testing its legs.
The lights going on over in New Jersey shimmered on the river and silhouetted the trees. I checked the French door for the reflection of that rich, defiant tail, its hairs quivering in the imperceptible night breeze. Nothing there. This was my moment.
I fetched a paper bag and a knife to cut away the ivy, and put on the orange rubber gloves I had used for the rat’s nest that long-ago morning after Q. told me how much he’d missed me in China. I raised the screen, gathered up the damp clump of leaves and other debris bearing the contours of a recently occupied bed, perhaps as languorous and welcoming as my own, stuffed them in the bag, then gathered up stray leaves and twigs so as to leave a clear and, I hoped, uninviting space. I fastened the screen firmly but left the window open, for it was oppressively, deliciously hot. I thrust the bag into the kitchen garbage can, washed my gloved hands, then removed the gloves and washed again. I felt like a mortician, though I had not touched or seen the body. I was one of those women in old villages the world over who clean up the remains, while the mourners go about the streets. Then I took the elevator to the basement, where I deposited the bed in its final resting place.
6
Mona was not entirely correct about the llamas, I learned at her party. She was so rarely wrong that I took a secret pleasure in her small error. Madelyn, her houseguest, wasn’t breeding the llamas, at least not yet. She had two, yes, but male.
“A female is very expensive, about ten thousand dollars. If I had ten thousand dollars I wouldn’t use it to buy a llama but to go around the world,” she explained in her thin, even voice, like a novitiate instructing a sixth-grade class. Madelyn paused a lot when she spoke, as Ev used to do, but her pauses seemed deliberately spaced to set off the words in a mystifying halo. Maybe I should have tried that with Q. from the start, to be more mysterious.
Madelyn was looking serene, tanned by the Southwest sun and draped in a long dress of vaguely Indian design and autumnal colors which made her pale face rise as if from one of Rousseau’s tropical jungles. She no longer had that air of faint disapproval, as though nothing in the vicinity quite met her standards. Life, or the llamas, had mellowed her.
“So what do you use them for?” I asked.
“For backpacking.”
“You rent them out to people who go into the mountains?”
“No, I go into the mountains myself. The mountains are full of mystery. I meditate.”
What did she do with the llamas while she meditated? If they were Tibetan and hence Buddhist, perhaps they would meditate also. But since according to Mona they were Peruvian in origin, I imagined Madelyn tethering them to a tree like a cowboy securing his horse while he lolled around the campfire or poked through the sagebrush.
“Another thing is, I keep combing them out, hoping to get enough wool to make myself a sweater, but I haven’t gotten there yet. A sweater takes an awful lot of wool.”
“I thought so, about the wool. And you—” I turned to Mona—“you said I was thinking of alpacas.”
Mona frowned, barely altering her intelligent, deadpan expression.. When she permitted it, her face could be astonishingly fluid, revealing a hidden powerhouse of emotion. No wonder she kept it guarded.
I studied Mona, lanky, sleek and dark, quite splendid in one of her thrift shop finds, a 1920s dress covered in fringes, suggesting an antique lampshade. Strange that I trusted her so thoroughly, while most thin people made me suspicious. Though my trust was wavering: not only had she been mistaken about the sex of the llamas and misleading about the wool, but this was not the little reunion dinner she had promised. The room was filled with people who for the most part were standing, not sitting, the mark of a full-fledged party. It was informal enough to join groups without an introduction, yet large enough so we’d be eating on our feet, buffet-style. Mona’s husband, Dave, was already carrying in platters from the kitchen. I’d have to be careful not to drop things.
I was in no shape for a party but had done my best, coaxed my body from bed and into festive attire, adorned my face with dangling earrings and makeup to mask its tense, bewildered look. The walk down the Drive was graced with one of our magnificent smoggy New York sunsets, creamy purple, amber and pink suspended over the river like a slice of melting spumoni. The kind of sunset that engenders, albeit briefly, faith in the world, love, redemption and every other good thing. Why sunsets should inspire such feelings, who can say? It must be a genetically programmed response to enable us to face nightfall, an appalling event, when you think of it—everything gradually losing color and outline to sink in blackness. Imagine how the first humans must have felt when they saw the night coming on. Maybe what made them human to begin with was the willing acceptance of night, the dawning of faith that light would return. I would have worshipped not the sun itself but its light. The sun is monotheistic, but light appears in
infinite forms, the gods and goddesses in their protean moods.
I had arrived infused by the sunset, eager to watch its finale from Mona’s high-ceilinged and benign apartment, and found this decorative crowd of theatre people. More spruced up and shiny than an ordinary crowd. Loud and expansive, with grand gestures and embraces, mannered pouts and raised eyebrows, smirks, snarls, and laughs of every sort. I’d always liked that atmosphere. It was no more artificial, really, than common social behavior, only more colorful. I might have taken on those manners had I stayed in the theatre. But just now it was daunting.
“Shit,” I’d greeted Mona, “it’s a real party.”
“Well, yes, it grew,” she said. “There were more people in town than I thought, and everyone wanted to bring their current loves, so here we are.”
I should have brought Tim—something tangible to show for the intervening years—but Tim had a meeting to attend, and not being a wife, I hadn’t dreamed of pressing him.
“The really lucrative thing about llamas, though .. ., is their manure,” Madelyn was saying. “It’s miracle manure. You can use it to grow just about anything, even in the desert. It’s like rabbit pellets, very dry and cohesive . . . only larger, of course. I’ve given some to my neighbors. They put it on their gardens and the results are astounding. Things grow miraculously, even in the dry soil we have.”
“Too bad you can’t package it and sell it,” I said.
“Oh, but that’s exactly what I’m planning to do. I hope to start packaging it next winter. After all, people love to buy Santa Fe things—Santa Fe jewelry, Santa Fe food. . . . Anything with a Santa Fe label has this incredible cachet.”
“Santa Fe shit,” said Mona, and my trust was fully restored. Never mind the size of the party or the error about the wool or her disconcerting thinness emphasized by the fringed green lampshade dress.
I hastened to click on the tape machine in my head, which fortunately could work retroactively, picking up the previous ten minutes and then running for about half an hour. This had to be transcribed for the data bank. It had the aura of usefulness, though I wasn’t sure why.
“It must be a beautiful place to live,” I said, setting her up and rolling the tape. “I remember last time I saw you, oh, four or five years ago, you were hoping to live there someday. It’s great that you’ve done it.”
“Yes, well, I wandered around for a while first. .. . I lived in Tibet for almost a year. I wanted to study a certain kind of folk music, which I did, and I lived in an ashram. You know, in Tibet . . . it’s amazing, people don’t have our notion that the individual is central, only the group. You’d never have a phenomenon like that Madonna movie, for instance. People in Tibet would be baffled at why . . . anyone should choose . . . such display of self.”
“You don’t have to be Tibetan to be baffled,” murmured Mona.
“In Tibet,” said Madelyn, “they feel themselves part of a community. Living in that atmosphere helped me get my priorities straight. At this point I feel .. . I have my life all worked out. I have the work I want to do. I live where I want to live. I get up in the morning and look out and see those wonderful mountains. I go to feed the llamas and gather their droppings and .. . I feel terrific.”
After a near-sacred hush, she added, “Mona told me about your husband. I was sorry to hear that. What a terrible experience it must have been. The city is such a violent place.”
Mona exchanged a meaningful conjugal glance with Dave, who was arranging silverware on the buffet table across the room. Here in our rotting but alluring city we were humble. We didn’t presume to work out our lives. If we get a meal nicely organized for thirty people, we feel it’s been a good day.
“Yes. Well, thank you,” I said. “It was a .. . a bad experience, as you say, but after two years you begin to—”
“Dinner!” called Mona loudly, saving me from myself and swiveling to face the guests, her fringes following along diagonally like a well-ordered regiment. As she turned back and faced me she rolled her green eyes.
Madelyn slipped away, the folds of her jungle dress disappearing behind someone’s somber slacks.
“So what did you make this time?”
“A new recipe. Llama mole,” Mona said.
I drifted off to say hello to people I hadn’t seen in years, not since the cast Halloween party where Q. assaulted the stagehand. Many of the same people were here—I wondered if they remembered it. We were in love in that savory adulterous way and Q. was going to tell Susan very soon. He came as Superman and I as Cleopatra—love makes you grandiose. So much so that not for a moment did I think of Susan at home with the flu, God forgive me. One of the stagehands showed up as a Nazi storm trooper—boots, belt, holstered gun, and a swastika on the sleeve of his uniform. As he goose-stepped around the room, people stared open-mouthed, a few trying feebly to laugh. Q. stalked over, puffing out his chest with the big red S. “That’s not funny,” he said. “In fact it’s vile.”
“Oh, come on,” the fellow answered, “where’s your sense of humor?”
“I have no sense of humor, that’s right.” The others tittered nervously; Q. was known for being funny. “I’d rather have no sense of humor than no brains.” More words. Knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch, “one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deny’st the least syllable of thy addition.” Words to that effect, more or less. We had just done Lear—Q. was Albany that time. Eventually Q. did start pummeling him as Kent did Oswald in the play, until the others tugged at his Superman cape and pulled him off. The knave got up, brushed off his uniform, and left. Q. was a hero but uncomfortable. “For my next number I’m going to fly,” he said awkwardly, and downed a glass of bourbon. I loved him so then. For the awkward remorse as much as for the attack of righteousness.
I made my way into the crowd for the hugs and shrieks. Thank goodness no one would offer condolences about the shocking death of my husband, since no one else here knew I had married him.
“What about Quinn?” asked Sonia, a broad-boned woman who was once Ophelia in Hamlet. Today she’d have been cast as Gertrude. “Are you two still in touch?”
“On and off. I had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago. He was in a movie they were shooting in Queens.”
I turned away, stumbling into a discussion about why women in concentration camps survived better than men. Because women are accustomed to mutual help and camaraderie, someone asserted. Did they survive better? I hadn’t known. The question was not unimportant; it was not even tedious, which was more than could be said for global warming and adolescent anomie, but as usual I couldn’t get interested. I kept thinking of all those newspapers Ev used to read in bed and how I had encouraged him to talk. I required conversation, and since he didn’t talk about personal matters I became very knowledgeable, even about global warming, which was just coming into its own as a topic when he was shot.
“I always felt sure you and Quinn would get together one day,” said Sonia, equally unable or unwilling, it appeared, to focus on the serious issue at hand. “I mean marry. Or something. But you never did, did you?”
“No. Not Quinn.”
“Are you married?”
“Not anymore.”
She smiled knowingly. “Me, too. I just divorced my second. It’s an epidemic. So how are you? I know you’ve done okay. I’ve seen your books in stores. My mother reads them.”
“To tell the truth, I’m feeling sick. In fact if I don’t sit down pretty soon I’m going to fall. Excuse me.”
Before I could move off she hustled me into a chair. “Sit. This minute. I knew it.” She placed a comradely hand on my shoulder even though we weren’t in a concentration camp; it wasn’t a question of outlasting the Nazis, just a pleasant little summer party. “I knew it. When you came in the door it took me a minute to recognize you, you were so changed, and it wasn’t only the years. I thought to myself, she must be sick. That is one sick girl.”
De
spair. All my efforts, my frisky clothes and ornaments, to no avail. I looked hideous. A spectator at life’s banquet (not so bad were it really llama mole). An invalid tolerated at merry parties out of pity. Invalid, meaning not valid.
“I’m going to get you some food,” said Sonia. “You stay right here. You’ll feel better once you eat. You can eat, can’t you?”
“I can eat just fine. But please don’t bother. I’ll get it myself in a few minutes.”
“Uh-uh. I’ll be right back.” And she was. Like a hospital orderly, she presented the plate and bade me eat; all we lacked was the wheeled tray across the bed. Poached salmon, potato salad with leeks, that was a new one for Mona. Tunisian carrots? My, my. I raised the fork obediently.
“Now, what is the matter with you?”
Like a fool, I told her. Too demoralized to make anything up—the very same problem I had at my desk.
“Ah, so that’s it. Listen, I must bring Greg over to meet you. He had that and he’s fine now. He’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
She zipped off and I immediately rose, fortified by a few bites of excellent salmon. I’m no good at keeping distress to myself. Despite all those years with Ev, or perhaps because of them, I always rush for solace.
Dave, an ideal husband in Mona’s view, the culmination of her hectic love life, was eyeing the array of food, possibly wondering if it was time to refill the platters.
“Tell me, Dave. Do I look sick? Sonia says I do.”
He studied me as judiciously as he had studied the table. Dave was one of those comforting people who seem at ease in their lives without making any fuss over it. It wasn’t hard to see his appeal to a woman whom love had frayed. He would never have announced that he had his life all worked out, yet he seemed to have done just that. Husky, round-faced, graying, he suggested a friar in a medieval monastery. I had to remind myself that he was not a friar but an industrial engineer. He knew no more about emotional blight than anyone else.
The Fatigue Artist Page 14