“I bet you did. You’re too much for him. It stands to reason—a witch, and he’s a mere rabbi. He must be scared to death and I don’t blame him.”
She reached over for a small, ornately carved brass box covered by wire mesh. “Your abdomen feels cold. It’s partly the change in weather, but I think I need to send some warmth there.” She placed a gauze pad on my stomach. With a small knife, she scraped some muddy stuff from inside the box and deposited it on the pad to form a little mound.
“What’s that?”
“It’s just moxa in a different form.” She flicked her handy cigarette lighter and applied the flame to the mound resting on my stomach. It sent up plumes of smoke like the warning signs of a volcano. “Tell me if it gets too hot.”
“What kind of spell is this? What horrible symptom will I get now?”
“Nothing from this. The symptoms you’re referring to are a result of the herbs and the acupuncture doing what they’re supposed to. I told you I’d be releasing heat and toxins to free up your energy. They have to come out in some way. What have you had this week?”
I gave her all my complaints.
“I’m not sure what to do, Laura.” It was the first time she’d shown a trace of exasperation. “You can’t tolerate the skin rashes or the stomach cramps or the fever. If you find it all unacceptable, then my hands are tied.”
“Your hands are tied?”
“Yes. Why, what’s so odd about that?”
“Nothing. It’s just.. . you know how sometimes you hear expressions literally, as if for the first time? That happens to me lately. Knowing you, I can’t imagine your hands are tied. You’ll find something. How about a vaginal infection? Yeast or whatever. That’s not so bad, and I’m not using it at the moment.”
“I can try, but I can’t promise. It’s your body that chooses how it responds to the treatment.”
“This potion on my stomach is heating up,” I said sullenly.
She quickly removed the gauze pad, grasping it deftly in her long fingers. “You are getting better, though, Laura. Don’t you feel it? Over and above the transient symptoms?”
“It could be. But the doctor said I might get better in a few months anyway. Who knows? I’m just tired of feeling this way. My patience is wearing down.”
When I was dressed, we kissed good-bye and hugged. She was large, and her body felt hard and supple as a palm tree. “Hold on,” she said.
Through summer’s ebb I keep walking along the river, Lungohudson, mostly in the late afternoons. Play areas with benches appear at five-minute intervals as if designed for my walking habits—and why not, if it’s my estate?—though my favorite is the sandbox where the huge tree stump sits serene amid the children’s rumpus, its bulging whorls of bark like the muscles of a tangled wrestling team. From exposure, the stump’s round-table surface has been bleached to a gray-beige color, with rivulets of yellow and brown and rose streaking through it as through marble. Even with its cracks and fissures, it looks as smooth as if a sculptor’s hands had stroked it patiently over and over until it became like the down of a peach. I imagine it would feel peachy to the touch, and porous, like downy human contours. I don’t touch it, though. I feel a bit of the awe we’ve been taught to feel in museums, and in fact the stump looks eerily man-made, iconic: nature copying primitive art. I’ve never seen anyone else touch it either—it’s so sublimely indifferent.
I like sitting where mothers and children congregate. I study the toddlers wobbling down the slide and rummaging in the sandbox, some of them bellicose, hurling sand as a weapon, others already accustomed to insult. The dreamers sit apart letting sand sift through their plump fingers, while the budding movers and shakers mark off their territory and busily organize equipment—pails, shovels, sieves. On the benches are mothers in varying degrees of attentiveness and an occasional father, but most of the watchers are black or Latina women whose children must be across the city with still other baby-sitters or grandmothers.
The plastic pails these days are notched at the bottom, for instant crenellations. What’s happened to craftsmanship? Jilly and I made our own crenellations, those long-ago summers on the beach, while Ev and Tony dived into the waves. We’d cut them out with sharp shells or with a tarnished butter knife from the house, suiting their size to the grandeur of the castle.
Over on the grass, a few small boys, barely old enough for school, are learning to swing their plastic bats. Each mother or baby-sitter stands six feet away and aims the ball slowly and directly at the bat. The boys swing out wildly the moment the ball leaves her hands. Their bodies are firm, rubbery, and energetic as the Tai Chi teacher urges us to be. Be like a child, he says, or rather the interpreter says. An infant. An infant is infused with energy and moves spontaneously, without tension or stiffness. See how firmly he grabs things in his fist. See how he falls so loosely, he doesn’t get bruised.
About one time out of five, the ball glances off the bat. One time in ten a boy will actually hit the ball, at which the mother sends up great cheers. The boys’ persistence in the face of such a high failure rate is admirable. It seems a marvel that they ever learn to hit the ball, yet they do, for only a block down the Drive, not much bigger boys, with no mothers standing by, are pitching, hitting, running, the whole ball game. At some mysterious point, the nerves connecting brain and hand draw up a contract, and bat smacks ball. Is all the practice necessary or would it happen in any case, like menstruation or erections or death?
A few seven-year-olds are learning to ride bikes with the training wheels removed by eager parents who trot along behind, one hand steadying the back of the seat. At some arbitrary moment the parents let go. Immediately, the children feel the withdrawal of the hand anchoring them to the earth, rooting them, and they hastily concentrate all their efforts on keeping the wheels balanced. Their blood turns to fear; they can’t relinquish their concentration and let the wheels roll, and yet it’s the surfeit of concentration that undoes them. No longer spontaneous, like infants, they’re sabotaged by effort, the mind turned in on itself. The bicycle starts rocking from side to side while the parents shout encouragement in English, Spanish, and Chinese: Just let go, relax and pedal. But the weight of concentration collapses in on the children; their panicky feet abandon the pedals and grope for firm ground. There they stand, shaky and forlorn, as the bicycle clatters to the pavement between their spread legs.
Yet how persistent they are, how bravely willing to climb back on, because for one immeasurably small instant between the removal of the steadying hand and the blood turning to fear, they felt the exhilaration of balance in motion, the blissful absence of effort, the joy of doing without doing. For this immeasurably small instant, they keep trying until one time, caught in the forward impulse, they fail to notice the removal of the steadying hand. They’re carried along, skimming through air for fifteen or twenty feet before the shock—I’m riding the bike, this is the whole idea!—jolts them into concentration once more—Can something so wonderful feel so natural? No, I must earn it!—and once more the bike rocks, this time with a loose, merry abandon. Again it clatters to the pavement, but this time the children stand above it triumphant, like heroes.
One afternoon I felt a spurt of energy, possibly the energy freed up by the low-grade fever et al., which were appearing as promised. This witch delivers. Enough of my own performance. I’d go across town and look at some real art.
A stab of guilt reminded me I was passing Tim’s building. Tim’s familiar window on the first floor, where he told me to knock if I passed by and wanted company. I’d ended it, finally, after our visit with Hal and Celia. Dismissed him, as he put it, slapping my extra set of keys down on his coffee table.
“Sure, I’m not serving any purpose anymore,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that? You’re not the only one who notices what’s going on. You’re not feeling sexy and you’re busy with your notebooks, so what do you need me for?”
“I’m very sorry,” I said, and pi
cked up the keys. “I certainly wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t want to hurt you but I just can’t. . . . It’s not a good time for me to be with anyone. This illness is messing up my head.
I need to sort things out.”
I said other embarrassingly lame things, but he was right to feel dismissed and we both knew it. Still, he wouldn’t be lonely for long. A couple of Saturday afternoons in the Museum of Modern Art should do it. Naturally I didn’t say anything so crude. Businesslike people like Tim are more sensitive than the arty types I’m used to: emotional violence and crudity are our raw materials, our daily bread.
Broadway was thick with strollers, shoppers, panhandlers, and neighborhood crazies cursing their unseen enemies. Tables of secondhand books and racks of clothing stood brazenly on the sidewalks, hot dog vendors dipped their tongs in the simmering vats, as a passing ambulance casually wailed and the Mister Softee truck piped its tune to scurrying children. So dense that I could feel the texture of the air. Practice swimming in air, the Tai Chi teacher said. This air felt more like soup. Thick, rich urban soup. Swimming in soup.
As I boarded the bus that swooped through Central Park, I clutched my bag closer. Joyce’s dismay as she rummaged through her purse was still vivid. I carried my composition notebook everywhere now, to jot down sentences as I unreeled the tapes: Joyce’s eating habits in restaurants, the subtle beliefs of the Tsumati, the witch’s supportive mother lighting candles in California. I couldn’t afford to lose it—I might not be as lucky as once before. There’d still be the typed sections on my desk, but I’d have to reconstruct the newer bits from memory, arduously piecing things together. A rough framework was already taking shape. If memory failed me I’d be forced to fill it in with invention, the way you make substitutions in a recipe when you’ve run out of the real thing. But I was low on invention, too.
Aside from typing faster and holding the notebook tight, I could only trust that the thing would shape itself with what was at hand, making opportunity its design, even making sense of loss, incorporating lost with found. And that the vibrations my ear picked up on the air would pipe a melody to charm me back to myself.
The museum had the look, feel, and smell of a major airport. Getting to the paintings required a great deal of waiting in line. In front of each painting were half a dozen people moving along in the slow, submissive fashion of passengers assembling to board the plane.
“I can’t understand why would he want to paint the same haystacks so many times.” The voice rose from a group leaving the Impressionist room, all similarly dressed for a cultural outing. They thronged the already crowded space.
“Carolyn, Carolyn,” came another voice a few feet off, near a Gauguin. “What say we take this one home?”
I inched on to a Vuillard painting wider than it was high.
“Can she cook and serve, though?” asked a woman edging up beside me.
The painting was in tones of red, burgundy, and maroon, merging into one another. Hues of blood.
“She cooks but she doesn’t serve,” a voice behind me replied. “But she’s very good, very thorough.”
Only gradually could I discern the figures of several women, Vuillard’s mother and sisters, according to the card on the wall. They seemed part of the richly patterned background rather than discrete entities.
“I have to have someone who can serve. The cooking alone is no use to me. Jane can cook all right but she can’t serve. She’s never been trained and she doesn’t have the finesse.”
Vuillard’s mother and sisters sewed at home for a living, the fact-packed card explained, and he painted them over and over, working at their machines. Sometimes he put himself in the paintings, too, a melancholy, bemused presence, but not in this one.
“Well, you can’t expect them to do everything. That’s how it is. If they can clean they can’t cook, and if they can cook they can’t serve.”
Vuillard’s mother and sisters emerged more clearly the longer I looked. It was up to the viewer to find them and dislodge them from their setting, as if they were reluctant to show themselves.
“That’s the hardest thing to get right, the serving. Since Dorothy went back to Barbados I haven’t had a single one. .. . By the way, this is gorgeous, isn’t it? Just gorgeous. I wish I could find drapes that color.”
I tired quickly and took a cab home to the waiting embrace of the bed. Near midnight I woke, tingling and restive. Another spurt of energy—the magic herbs, no doubt, coursing through the channels.
I sat at my desk and wrote down what I’d heard in the museum. Just to clear it from my ears—it was too obvious to be of any use. Next I typed up some pages from the notebook: the water level in Hal and Celia’s pool, the story of the color-blind immigrant and his capes of many colors which appealed to Sarah Bernhardt, as well as Harvey’s being spoonfed applesauce at an indeterminate but definitely inappropriate age. Simple enough work, but my fingers had a different agenda. Typos, misspellings, and homonyms appeared. Familiar phrases ever so slightly off. Shades of Hortense! Had my fingers forgotten the layout of the keyboard? Protesting this project made of scraps? They preferred the small seaside town.
I paced through the apartment as if taking inventory, putting errant things in place. Restoring order may be the tangible expression of panic, but it’s also the remedy. I stared out at the night and checked on the river, always reliable. The squirrel hadn’t appeared for a while but the nest was there—I’d grown careless about cleaning it up. It had come to seem a natural growth on the ledge, like the ivy of which it was made. My heart pulsed, craving action. Again I tried to type my notes, but hands and brain refused to cooperate, as if they’d never been properly introduced, as if I were one of the small boys wildly swinging a plastic bat.
On the desk was a letter from my editor, no longer Gretchen, alas. A couple of years after introducing me to Ev at that book party, she’d joined a group of radical activists bound for Central America and stayed. Somewhere in Guatemala, she was teaching children to read. The letter slipped through my fingers to the floor. I picked it up and gripped it firmly with both hands. He’d had no luck reaching me by phone, he wrote, and politely chided my not using the answering machine. What about lunch someday soon? Oh, and he was enclosing the galleys of a hot new novel of disaffected, coke-snorting youth, hoping I’d supply some words of praise to help sell it. How was my work progressing, by the way?
It would be politic, to say the least, to reply. Keep the show going. Grace once mentioned a performance artist who sent his friends postcards announcing what time he got up each morning, and occasional telegrams saying, “I am still alive.” After a while these were collected and hung in a gallery, making a statement of sorts. A document.
Dear Colin, Am I correct in interpreting your six-month silence as a faint brushoff, a sign that my stock is sinking, or am I being oversensitive? I knew a man once who used to say I was very touchy, but never mind. Yes, probably you were on vacation, or in a meeting. . . .
No, no, no, that would never do. What’s gotten into you, Laura? Delete.
Dear Colin, Yes, I’m starting a novel. I do appreciate your interest, but in all honesty, I suspect it’s not going to be any more “commercial” than the last. Probably less so. At least with the way it’s shaping up I can’t see . . .
Out of control. Is this what Hortense meant when she said she couldn’t sew properly? Delete, and fast.
Dear Colin, Yes indeed, there’s a new book in the works. And what a blockbuster it will be! Victorian neurasthenia, origins ambiguous. Or call it immune-system breakdown, sign of the times. Action-packed thrills on every page: fevers, vertigo, muscle aches. Long walks along bodies of water. Oh, yes, and a love triangle. Well, not exactly a triangle but something or other. And much, much more. Maybe not quite blockbuster material, come to think of it. Maybe a trifle self-involved, as my late husband used to say, if that isn’t an oxymoron . . .
The poor computer was perplexed. Are you sure you wish to
delete? it kept asking. You are deleting more than can be retrieved. Well, yes, I’ve made that mistake before. I took pity on it and got a grip on my wayward fingers.
Dear Colin, I’m sorry I missed your calls. Yes, I’d love to have lunch but I’m very tied up with work at the moment. How about in a month or two, when I’ve gotten things organized. I’ll give you a call then, and look forward to seeing you. Warmly, Laura. PS. The galleys look intriguing—I’ll have a look as soon as I can.
There. An impeccable performance. So lifelike, you could hardly call it a metaphor. Simply the cry we all utter behind each small, ritual interchange. “I am still alive.”
Save. Print. Bed.
I haven’t made it to the Tai Chi class since I returned from the Cape, but I’ll get there this morning no matter what. I wake early to allow time for the somnambulistic rites. Raising shades, opening windows, checking the squirrel’s empty bed and greeting the river, this cool, crisp morning streaked by silver light with lime-green patches like splashes of Pernod.
Going down the hill to the park I meet Grace, looking morose. “Hi. How’s your dental performance shaping up? I hope I didn’t miss it while I was away.”
“Don’t worry,” she mutters. “It’s off.”
“Really? That’s too bad. What happened?”
“The dentist made a pass at me.”
“Oh, for Chrissakes. I thought you knew him. He was interested in the project, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, well, I see what he was interested in. I don’t know him that well—I’ve seen him maybe three or four times. And he did it in such a canny way too. Yuck.”
“During the root canal work?”
“No, it wasn’t a regular visit. I stopped in to pick up some insurance form. Just as I was leaving, at the door, he bent over fast and kissed me on the lips and cupped my breast with his hand. The hand that wasn’t holding the doorknob. I swear, it was so quick I couldn’t do a thing. In an instant he had the door open and there I was facing a waiting room full of people.”
The Fatigue Artist Page 28