The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  We sat down in a Greek diner—Q. can’t stand anything even mildly fashionable—and started to talk about the book, but a troop of high school kids paraded in, turned on the jukebox and screeched over the music.

  This is intolerable, he said. We can’t hear each other speak. Come back to my place. I’m staying in Peter’s apartment, you know, my ex-brother-in-law but we’re still friends.

  I don’t think so.

  Come on, there’s no one home and it’s too cold to take a walk.

  But not to make love, I said.

  Who said anything about making love? He laughed as he took my arm against the wind and pulled me close. You’re the one who’s always got that on your mind. We’re old friends. Surely we can sit somewhere quiet and talk.

  The apartment was full of Victoriana. Knickknacks. Fringed lampshades. Silhouettes on the walls. A velvet chaise.

  I’ve always wanted to lie on a chaise, I said, and stretched out.

  It suits you, said Q. He pulled up a chair and sat beside me.

  We stared at each other and I felt the danger. Q. all over again.

  How pregnant can you be? A few hours?

  Two months. I’ve hardly told anyone.

  I remember when Susan was pregnant. I used to put my hand on her belly and feel it kicking.

  Well, this one’s not doing anything yet so you can just stop. Really, Q., this is silly.

  All right, but I have to kiss you. May I?

  He slid down from the chair so he was kneeling beside me.

  You’re being adolescent.

  You’re quite right. When was the last time I asked permission to kiss someone? I think after the Junior Prom.

  I touched his hair. I couldn’t help it. Maybe you’ll turn into a frog, I said.

  Isn’t it the frog who turns into a prince when she kisses him?

  Yes. But with you it’s the other way around. You’re a frog disguised as a prince. All it takes is one kiss.

  Ah, I see. He drew back. That is a very damning thing to say about a person, Laura.

  I think you even look a little like a frog. I think you’re beginning to get a little green around the eyes and mouth.

  There’s nothing I can say to explain, is there?

  I can’t imagine what.

  Even though you were the one who got married?

  What are you saying? You were married already. Let’s get back to kissing, he said. It’s easier.

  Let’s not, I said a moment later. I don’t think this will be good for my health. Not with a frog.

  Why don’t you move over and let me lie down. Maybe I can still add something to the gene pool.

  I sat up. That’s an awful thought. What’s got into you? You were never awful before. In that way, I mean. I shouldn’t have come here. I’m going home.

  As you wish, said Q. with a sigh, and he stood up to let me pass. I’ll call you when I’m back in town. We’ll try again.

  Meanwhile, why don’t you fall in love just to pass the time?

  That reminds me, I never asked about your husband. What is he like? Do you love him?

  Why should you care what he’s like? Of course I love him. Why else would I marry him?

  Good. I’m glad. I want you to be happy, said Q. at the door.

  Frog! I said. Just one step up from a toad.

  A few days later I had a miscarriage. Cramps, blood, terror. My cousin Joyce, luckily in town and not in Africa gathering anthropological data on her chosen ethnic group, the Tsumati, took me to the hospital in a cab, towels packed between my legs. Ev was still in El Salvador. I could easily have invited Q. over that day but I was afraid. It had never occurred to me to be afraid of this. The baby I had barely welcomed into me was gone, I’d imagined there would be ample time to think about it and truly come to want it, and now there was nothing left. No baby. Ev away. No Q. Only books to write. I had already written about loss but overnight I became an expert.

  I felt guilty, as if I had shaken the baby loose from its moorings by making love with Q. I had to keep reminding myself that I hadn’t made love with Q., not at all, only kissed him a few times and thought about making love. What harm could that do? Still, I couldn’t help connecting the two events, my kissing Q. and losing the baby. Once more I wanted never again to see him or hear his voice or his name mentioned, and if by chance I had come upon his face on the screen, as in that silly murder mystery where he appeared in the guise of a pastry chef, I would have climbed past the row of irritated people and fled the theatre to stumble about the streets until the fresh air dissolved his image.

  In the end, I blamed him for the loss of the baby. I attributed to him great and impossible powers. Absurd. Whatever spells his gray eyes could cast, Q. wasn’t that kind of sorcerer. He liked children. He had so many of his own; he would have liked mine, too.

  Mona lived with three different men before finding Dave, her great love, at last. He was the reward after preliminary stages of lesser men, more troublesome men, just as the swineherd of fairy tales after many trials marries the king’s daughter. Whether or not it would stand up to scrutiny, this private narrative satisfies her. An opposite narrative satisfies me. Q. was the first: everything since then is measured against the original enchantment, and is a falling off. We have not always been lovers. We’ve not even been friends, always. But we have always been.

  I called mine an ill-considered marriage, a while ago. But perhaps it wasn’t after all. It left ample room for Q. Apart from the baby I never felt guilty over him—how could I? It would have been like feeling guilt at looking in a mirror or at the negative of one’s own photo. It’s true I believe in lying in the bed you make. But I had made my bed with Q. long ago, and Ev never cared to know whether I had a bed elsewhere. Anyway, I was bound to it.

  I never wished Ev would disappear. That he would go away, yes, and then return. He did often go away on assignment. I liked the solitude, smoother in texture than the abrading solitude I felt when he was home. Then after a while I would begin to miss his wraith-like presence gliding through the house, the precise, absorbed way he patted his trousers down on the hanger and ran a fingernail along the crease, and measured out his coffee, dreamily sniffing the aroma, and cleared his desk every night to leave a bare surface, and squinted to trim his beard, and rustled his newspapers in bed. Above all, I missed his embraces, slow, melancholy, and intense. Then and then alone he was fully present, fully mine. He gave all he had to give, his inscrutable sadness. It was as if all the sadness were distilled, at those moments, into physical yearning.

  I never knew why he chose me, and only after he was killed and I could see his life as a completed span did I understand he hadn’t chosen me at all: I was dropped in his lap. When I was introduced to him at the party, he must have had some vague, inarticulate sense of my readiness and diffidence, which suited his own readiness and diffidence well enough for him to take the next step and the next, until before he knew it he was married to me, and I suppose that suited him well enough, too. Perhaps his heart also was broken, and all during our marriage he remained in thrall to Margot, the psychiatrist, without knowing it. Perhaps we had more in common, Ev and I, than we ever dreamed, and if we could meet in some region where the happenings of this world are viewed from a great distance as the laughable nothings they are, we could tell our secrets and even smile ruefully at the companionable but silent life we led together. I could tell him—and he’d listen with interest—how Q. came back. And back. That that was my marriage, in its fashion.

  Q. was even faithful, in his fashion. Not long after I lost the baby, the loss I blamed on him because we kissed, he called me, undaunted.

  Laura, my love?

  Q.! Where are you?

  Downtown. Come see me in Lear. Please. I want you to be there.

  Lear? You’re playing Lear?

  No, no. I’m not ready for that. It’s years away. I’m playing Kent.

  Kent? You can’t be serious.

  Why, what’s so funny
?

  Kent the faithful servant? My God. No one could accuse them of typecasting.

  He fell silent, which almost never happened.

  Q., are you there? What’s the matter? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.

  You don’t think I could do Kent? (Dear Q. It wasn’t the insult to his character that he minded, but the inferred slight to his talent.) I can do Kent better than anybody. People understand their opposites best of all. Don’t you know that, Laura?

  Forget I said anything. Tell me where it’s playing.

  Like a child, he brightened up. He made a magnificent Kent. “Now, banished Kent,” he addressed himself, full of dignified humility, “If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemned, So may it come thy master whom thou lov’st Shall find thee full of labors.” Trippingly on the tongue, no trace of the very faint accent that crept in when he was worn out or just waking from sleep or making love.

  Kent is put in the stocks. “Some time I shall sleep out, the rest I’ll whistle.” Yes, that was very like Q. At the end he prepares for death: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. My master calls me; I must not say no.”

  I cried. As if he were my child, I was that proud. So what if he couldn’t ever be a Kent, or only for a few days at a stretch? He could portray him. The real Kent might be charmless, a bit of a bore, even. You might not want him around all the time. By the final curtain I had convinced myself that the image, the performance, superseded the reality: a true child of my time.

  I went backstage and threw my arms around his neck, and in his weather-beaten tunic he picked me up and twirled me in circles, exulting: I told you I could do it! I told you! Later, bending over me in his hotel bed, he whispered, What does it matter who we really are? I’m really the Fool. It’s the Fool you love. II Matto.

  ON ONE OF HIS TRIPS TO NEW YORK we all found ourselves at a large party. Q. and I hid our astonishment and made ludicrously civil introductions all around. Our host, a doctor acquaintance of Ev’s just back from a stint in Nicaragua, happened to be an uncle of Q.’s latest love, a vixenish Dubliner who sang Irish folk songs. While she was off helping her aunt remove a turkey from the oven, Q. behaved outrageously, stroking my hip as we were wedged together between the wall and a table laden with raw vegetables, stroking gently and unremittingly while we chatted with strangers who in the general crush could see nothing amiss. We were so cramped that I couldn’t have stopped him even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to. Ev was across the room with the doctor, talking no doubt about the scarcity of medical supplies in Nicaragua, his face intent and animated in a way it rarely was when he talked to me. I liked the secrecy and the bad taste of it, the idea of behaving so badly together with Q.

  When we next met he told me he’d found Ev cold. Oh, not cold, I corrected. Withdrawn, remote; it was different. But nothing could soften Q.’s verdict. You only saw him that one time, I would protest years later. That was enough, Q. said. Besides, he had read Ev’s book about Central America and seen him on a couple of television panels. Admit it, I said finally, you wouldn’t like anyone I married. Not at all, he said, I’m capable of being objective. You could have married me yourself, I said. You got married first, he said. And so it went, everlastingly, the climax of the dialogue taking place in a shabby, enchanted Mexican restaurant a year and a half before Ev was killed.

  I hoped Ev’s first wife, Margot, would come to the funeral. You don’t exactly issue invitations, but I told Tony and Jilly she was welcome. No need for animosity between us; it was she who had ended their marriage (and by now I understood why, even if Ev hadn’t). I imagined we might compare notes as women do, and between us give him the weight he lacked, compacted out of our grieving breath and voices. We could summon into existence that part of him he had never allowed to exist, and thus complete him in death. But clearly she had no taste for that enterprise for she didn’t come.

  Q. came. Naturally. And how well he behaved on this occasion. Most people behave ineptly at funerals, as if some prescribed mode of behavior exists which unfortunately they haven’t been taught, and so they concoct a somber, clumsy role. But Q., who concocts roles moment by moment, was perfect, blending easily with the large assembly. He modulated his billowing energy into an exquisite courtesy, just the sort of discretion Ev prized. I marveled while I mourned. With the others, he stepped up to greet me in my role of bereaved widow, took my hands and murmured the appropriate words. Sorry, sorry. Well, of course he was sorry, even if he hadn’t liked Ev. Who isn’t sorry at a funeral, most of all sorry that they have to attend.

  So perfectly sorry that no one could have detected a trace of our streaky passion, or of our confusion, which I sensed drifting in on the vibrations of the future. What now? As the bereaved, I needn’t think of that future for a while. But it would drift closer. Once, I had craved a life with Q. Now I wasn’t sure we could exist in brightly lit reality. We had gotten so used to our shadow life together, alongside our ordinary lives which had been forms of faithlessness: for Q., falling in love, and for me, staying married to Ev.

  Fragments of ambivalence, beads on a string. The hard question in telling any story is, Which are the beads and which is the string?

  9

  Very soon Jilly and I are settled into a routine. I’m alone much of the time and glad of it. My sack of fear is emptying, my heart beating almost at a normal rate. But a different kind of fear is replacing the old—a calmer, duller kind. That I’ll get used to living like this.

  Meanwhile, I work at taking things in for future use, absorbing data for the book. I stroll through the handful of shops and visit the museum displays: harpoons once used to spear whales from shore, antique hip boots, fishing rods and seafaring gewgaws, glass-encased yellowed clippings about storms and foundered ships. Diligently, I read the local paper, which shows civic life as quite eclectic, the Ladies’ Aid church rummage sale and Rescue Squad bake sale alongside the writers’ group and yoga classes, the recycling get-togethers and meetings of La Leche League (“children always welcome”).

  Mostly I sit on the beach for long spells—an observer might not perceive it as work—reading, dozing, watching the tides move up and back.

  It’s not only the moon that pulls but the sun, too, the library book explains. Each one beckons to the spinning planet. The land is firm, recalcitrant, but the water, ah, the fluid, responsive water leaps to the desire of the celestial bodies. The tides are the answer to that importuning call from far in space, the reaching up for the two lovers, sun and moon. The tides leap highest, reach farthest, when the sun and moon are aligned and pulling in the same direction, which happens, as Ev said, just after the new and full moon. Spring tides, they’re called. Not for spring, the season, but spring, the response. At half-moon the sun and moon are at right angles to the earth, tugging in opposite directions; confused, pulled this way and that, the waters subside into stillness and lethargy. Then the tides are at their lowest: neap tide. Their apparent docility is the result of an impasse.

  The newspaper prints a chart showing the times of high and low tides each day, with variations in minutes from beach to beach, ocean side and bay side, up and down the coast. It seems wondrous that this can be calculated—the exact moment the water will reach its highest and lowest points on the waiting tractable beach, whose task is to be covered and exposed, covered and exposed, through the rounds of darkness and light, as if a giant pair of hands on high were doing Tai Chi and by the force of their energy drawing up, then releasing the waters. Real masters can raise lakes and oceans by the movements of their hands, one of the Tai Chi teacher’s parables says.

  The passage from high to low tide takes roughly six and a half hours, but is sometimes closer to six and a quarter, sometimes seven. I couldn’t find the clue that determined such small variations. The tides are predictable, but like everything in nature, regular only up to a point. I suppose that on the scale of the cosmic passion impelling the triangle of sun, moon, and water, irregularities of a few minutes
hardly count.

  I DRIVE FROM ocean side to bay side several times a day—only a couple of miles apart—marking the changes in water and light. The strip between them is the town, the safe haven, its geographical task to divide the waters.

  I love the bay at low tide, when the water has retreated so far that you can walk out close to half a mile on the mud flats. Small children go chasing hermit crabs while their parents dig for clams and mussels, tossing them into the children’s plastic pails. Sun-lovers set low beach chairs way out on the flats to bask for hours as the water slowly—but always faster than expected—comes lapping at their toes, soon to reach the slatted seats. There’s something primeval about the scene: sun, dunes with their gray-green shrubbery, and vast stretches of mud covered by a shiny film of water. So it must have looked when that crucial wayward fish slithered in and gasped for breath.

  Out in the distance sits the old blackened ship, its charred remains submerged then revealed at the whim of the tides, a permanent fixture in the landscape through endurance and longevity. At high tide it looks impossibly far, but at low tide it seems I might walk to it, if I had the strength. I can walk more easily here than in the city, ten or fifteen minutes at a time, once I get revved up. My body simply needs coaxing like an old car, like the pickup that resourceful Jilly got to move.

  One afternoon I was seized with the desire to examine the ship close up, and impulsively set out. When I was tired enough to turn back, the ship seemed no closer. For several days I tried, checking in the papers for the hours of low tide. Each day I went a little farther out, but the ship got no closer. If nothing else, I was increasing my own endurance. Then I would rest on the beach, and drive over to the ocean to watch the waves.