by Lucy Ellmann
That night I dreamed my duck got very big and vanquished all her assailants. She was about the size of an elephant! But when she still hadn’t appeared the next day, I called the Sag Harbor store to cancel my order for more duck pellets. They didn’t seem to care—they hadn’t been impressed with my order in the first place—and their indifference hurt.
When I got home, I took Bee’s book on Matisse out onto the porch, the only thing I’d brought back with me from England (besides Bee’s ashes and the bird’s nest). I’d intended to read it on the plane but some kid behind me kept saying “Ronaldo” and I couldn’t concentrate. But that was no place to think about Matisse anyway. It wasn’t a metaphysical plane.
Bubbles immediately claimed my lap and started licking herself, and then my hand, in an overspill of affection. She had a way of looking at me with such love it made me want to laugh—or cry. Bubbles was good at love, good at being happy; these are creditable skills.
As for Matisse—now there’s a guy who liked his pajamas! He’s in his pj’s, the models are in pantaloons, and he tries to share in their joie de vivre by painting them. These women aren’t overly concerned about how they look to him—they’re in their own world, a zone of pleasure that Matisse envies. The perpetually anxious, heat-seeking, peace-loving Matisse longed to please with those odalisques of his, to please himself and us. Like Puccini, Matisse really came to terms with the fact that women EXIST. Matisse looks at women the way a lover does, not like a dad. Fathers only disapprove of their wives and daughters. The role of the lover is to approve and applaud them, appease them, please them. Even idealize them a bit, what the hell?
What have most men done for women’s joie de vivre? All we’ve done is bore women to death, bore them into compliance with our idiocies. When we aren’t beating them up, or burning them as witches, we deafen them with our noise—VROOM VROOM, BANG BANG, POW-WOW, RAT-A-TAT-TAT! We’ve filled the earth with radioactive waste. And all our kvetching, our pontificating, the prevaricating, the listless, unimaginative fornicating. No wonder women always seem on the verge of insanity!
I thought of what Bee went through, yelled at by our imperious (murderous) dad, battered by that lawman of a husband, and finally extinguished, brutally and for no reason, by a dope with a gripe against women. I lay on that porch and thought of the whole world of women wronged, burned, beaten, badgered, and bereft; ignored from birth. They trailed past me in a half-sleep. Was there a single woman alive who hadn’t been mistreated by some maniac, simply because he knew he could get away with it? Was there a single woman who hadn’t suffered injustices because she was a woman, a single one? For many it was worse than that: stoned to death in the street, beheaded in a grocery store, thrown overboard off a yacht. We all look the other way, we’ve seen it all before, yeah, yeah, you can’t change human nature…
Half the women I knew were scared to walk through the countryside alone (and the other half probably should have been). Half the women I knew had been bashed up by some worthless guy. They’d all had to watch a million disrespectful movies about blonde bombshells, and then there was all the porn; and the News, the daily briefings on the ways in which women’s lives can be scuppered by rapists, serial killers, or guys like Tiger Woods who can’t keep his putz in his pants. They’d all watched a million male maestri conduct a million all-male orchestras, playing pieces only by men (okay, there’s a little Clara Schumann once in a while—big deal). And all the women I knew (and treated) tried too hard to be good, to look good, be nice, be sweet, be patient—tried so hard, when they were all fine in the first place!
I looked down at the sage plant I’d saved. I’d bought it in Sag Harbor, outside the animal feed store, bought it because it was dying, and planted it at the bottom of the porch steps, and now it was thriving, twice the size. The unvoiced sufferings of plants could make you a nervous wreck! I looked at that sage I’d saved with the contentment that comes from freeing something that needs freeing.
Far away across the lawn, my neighbor was hanging up wet clothes on the line, with the thwacks and wallops that procedure always seems to entail. Yes, those wrinkles had to go! She arranged her wash in strict order: paired socks, pants, shirts, towels, pillowcases—how big was this washing machine? Finally, out came an old patchwork quilt, and this too she carefully spread out on the line to dry. Was it because it was wet that it looked so great, or because I was seeing it against the sun? The battered old thing glowed like a stained-glass window! This was the way museums should show off their quilts (I had to tell Mimi some time): get them wet and light them from behind.
I lay on my lounger on the porch and thought about women, all the crazy stuff they do. The painted bowls of Brittany, plaited Russian loaves, all the knitted baby jackets, flower-embroidered handkerchiefs and pillowcases, the smocking, the snacking, the puddings and baked goods and preserves. The freezing and the thawing too, the wrapping and unwrapping, the cleaning and sorting and folding and smoothing—all the pooh-poohed peaceful arts of women, of odalisques. Women invented coziness! They could see humanity was never going to get very far without some comfort, some sense of stability. People don’t thrive on harshness and indifference. I thought of my own lunging odalisque, who’d come to me distrustful but then miraculously blossomed. Blood and bone, blood and bone, that’s what women are. They’re REAL.
The laundress had gone inside. I was all alone out there and everything was quiet. I moved the lounger onto the grass but the sun was so blinding, I shut my eyes and just listened to the swaying, swishing trees for a while—and when I opened my eyes, everything was aglow. Not just the sky and the clouds: every blade of grass, every different type of leaf, every petal glowed. The white shirts on the line were dazzling, soaking up the ultraviolet. Stones were sparkling. The whole world seemed devoted to the sun, begging for it and basking in it. Whether absorbing light (the dirt) or reflecting it (a puddle), everything was responding to light in some way. The thinnest leaves no longer seemed flimsy and vulnerable but intentionally diaphanous, so as to be filled with light. Everything out there wanted light and needed to glow. Bubbles too! Fur, hair, and feathers glow. Water glows, collecting and transmitting, no, playing with light. Everything seeks and leaks light.
This is what Matisse discovered in the South of France, eyeing up those odalisques. all artists know this (Bee was always talking about light but I never knew why until now). For a long time I’d had it in for fire, I didn’t think we really needed it. Only earth, air, and water interested me. But that day I accepted that the sun wins. I was finally reconciled to fire.
The earth is pretty flat, just a bas-relief—you see this on Long Island. To get three-dimensional, you have to look up: at the clouds, the sky. Only the sky is really 3-D—that’s all it is! Air, space, and light. A skein of geese flew overhead, not in a V-shape, but in the shape of a breast, with a nipple. The shape changed and several different types of breast were offered. But all of them were good.
Bubs and I took the boat out for one last voyage on the pond that evening, and scattered Bee’s ashes there: my sage sister, goddess of rivers and springs, who loved Bach, Dickens, and Matisse, loved me (and hated Ant and Bee), and thought Ben Jonson much better than Shakespeare.
It is not growing like a tree
In bulke, doth make man better bee;
Or, standing long an Oake, three hundred yeare,
To fall a logge, at last, dry, bald, and seare:
A Lillie of a Day
Is fairer farre, in May,
Although it fall, and die that night;
It was the Plant, and flowre of light.
In small proportions, we just beauties see:
And in short measures, life may perfect bee.
With one day left, I went to the beach. I didn’t want to leave Sagaponack, I didn’t want to go to Bee’s memorial, I didn’t even want to go to the beach. In despair, I stumped along. The water wasn’t moving: it looked weird, like ice, or the desert. Everything was so quiet I could he
ar my shirtsleeves rustle against my ribcage as I walked, and it irritated me. I could hear my breath. And then, in quick succession, a boat, a car, a motorbike, a plane. Only one of each, but still annoying. Every bird call grated, every mild wave bubbling against the shore gave me a start.
It reminded me of summer days when you’re a kid, and you just don’t know if you’re going to make it through three months of this. When the sight of a cloud, or the Good Humor Man, is a major event—even though he came every day and handed me an ice-cream sandwich, and a popsicle for Bee. Our biggest hope was that a tornado would hit, blowing the roof of our house off, the sky suddenly darkening and your bed twirling up and up. Apocalypse fantasies.
I searched for my melancholy meadow of rounded stones, but couldn’t find it. So I sat down and made my own sculpture, a miniature barbecue, with jagged little red rocks for steaks, and yellow oval pebbles for baked potatoes. Inside some tiny open clam shells I put lentil-like orange pebbles = scallops! Must have been hungry. An ant marched by carrying a huge seed. Never eat anything bigger than your head, man.
Then I headed home to find that Bubbles, who never bit or scratched or stole food, but instead licked me with love, Bubbles, who would stand outside on the porch and look at me so hopefully, waiting to be let in, Bubbles, who followed me around the house and the yard, and had come with me in the boat every time to feed the duck, Bubbles, who sat on my lap at the piano, at the kitchen table, on the lounger, in the car, Bubbles, who warmed herself so happily by the woodstove, and drank the milk I gave her and ate too much Fancy Feast (my fault, not hers), Bubbles, who knew and tolerated with true aplomb my every mood, Bubbles, who had found her way into my bedroom that first night in New York and poked her head around the door so inquiringly, so comically, Bubbles, who definitely had a sense of humor, Bubbles, who greeted me gently whenever I struggled downstairs all wrung out and hungover, Bubbles, who did stretches and jumps just as good as Kit Smart’s cat Jeoffry, Bubbles, who could leap vertically, six feet in one bound, Bubbles, who, when lying on her side on a chair, could twist herself backward in a complete circle so you saw both her face and her ass at the same time, Bubbles, who played exuberantly with string (whenever I remembered that’s what cats like and dangled some for her), Bubbles, with her inquisitiveness about all things, especially cupboards and boxes, Bubbles, with her great concentration powers, staring at stuff for minutes at a time, displaying greater intelligence and gifts of perception than any other cat (and some people) I’d known, Bubbles, who had spread herself out on my bed every night, wherever we were, taking up as much room as Gertrude ever had, but much more invitingly, Bubbles, who was also more fun as a movie companion, Bubbles, who hated Gertrude but took to Mimi instantly, Bubbles, who, when first released from her igloo death-trap on New Year’s Eve, had gratefully rubbed against my leg and settled herself on my shoulder without a moment’s hesitation, Bubbles, who loved me, yes, loved me, and looked at me with love, Bubbles, so beautiful, so warm and soft and funny, with her white, orange and black coloring like Hallowe’en candy, Bubbles, so full of beans, so appreciative of anything I did for her, Bubbles, with her supreme knack for coziness and contentment, flopping half off her cushion by the woodstove like the odalisque she was, Bubbles, who could intone, who had rhetoric… Bubbles got run over.
I heard miaowing coming from the shed as soon as I got near the house, and hoped, not so much selfishly as instinctively, that it was some other cat. But when I peered in, there she was, crouching in the darkest corner, among all the spiderwebs and snail shells and chipmunk shit. I couldn’t reach her very easily, so I tried to lure her out with some Fancy Feast, but she wouldn’t come. Then I knew something was up. So I slid over to her and gently pulled her poor crushed body to me, got her wrapped in a towel, and rushed her to the vet on Goodfriend Road in Easthampton. Once she was in the car, she was ominously silent.
They put her on a drip to get her temperature up before they could x-ray her—she was in shock. The x-rays confirmed that she’d been run over: the injuries couldn’t have happened any other way. Somebody had run her over and left her to die. But the prognosis was good. The great Bubbles! She’d have to stay at the animal hospital for a few weeks to have surgery on her back leg, and a paw, but they thought she would walk normally again in the end.
“And jump?” I asked.
“And jump,” the vet said.
“And no pain? She’ll be pain-free?”
“Well, it’s always hard to tell with animals. You know. They’re good at resignation. They often don’t show pain. But there’s no reason that she should be in pain once we’ve fixed her up, Dr. Hanafan. Don’t worry, she’s going to be fine.”
Bubbles, who’d been hit by some asshole of a millionaire and left to crawl away and die, crawl away and die, would be fine. She would be fine.
I went home and finished all the booze in the house. Then I went out on the porch and looked at the sage I’d saved.
Sunset in Sagaponack is when nature begins to regain some control and us homocentric humans don’t seem so such much. Things settle and dampen. The dim blue sky still glows but night is forming in the shadows. I wanted to freeze time, hold on to that sky, that color. And then the smell of the moist earth hit me, the best smell in the world! I realized this was the smell I should have been smelling all my life—I should go out at dawn and dusk to smell it.
I watched as a lone bug rose up toward the sky. Nobody has ever helped her, I thought, she has always been alone. But that wasn’t true. The sun had helped her. She flew toward it now.
Huge flocks of starlings molded and remolded themselves into one big undulating cloud, as if to celebrate surviving another day. We are free! they squealed. Free to live and mate and feed our young, and all is forgiven (the day’s squabbling over food, the day’s dangers). A grace of starlings, a murmuration? I once heard it’s called a wedding.
The moon hovered low in the sky, not a perfect circle yet but big and sassy, friendly-looking, reflected brokenly in puddles—doing that staring act she’s done a million times. She’s been taking a very good look at us for years, the earth’s long-suffering waif wife.
Saftly, saftly, through the mirk
The müne walks a’ hersel’:
Ayont the brae; abüne the kirk;
And owre the dunnlin bell.
I wudna be the müne at nicht
For a’ her gowd and a’ her licht.
FLAG DAY
I didn’t want to linger in my apartment any longer than necessary—without Mimi or Bubbles, the whole place stank. I checked my answering machine (condolences, but nothing from Mimi), put on a suit, threw some overnight stuff in my briefcase for the trip to Virtue and Chewing Gum later on, and set off for the gallery.
Feeling pretty monosyllabic after my fourteen days in the wilderness, I was hoping the memorial would be a quiet affair in a back room. But Bee’s dealer had cleared the whole joint to accommodate several Coziness Sculptures (no small matter). The walls were covered in Bee’s drawings, and (laminated) articles on Bee, not just obituaries but practically every review she’d ever received and a whole lot of letters and notes and other memorabilia I’d never seen. Hundreds of people were rushing from one wall to another in an orgy of appreciation and grief, some crying, some just nodding and smiling. I headed over to the violinist, who was playing the Bach partitas I’d asked for. Bach knew about death—half his children died. He would see me through, if anybody could, his worldliness and depth. Cleave to that. As Claude Rains says in Deception, it’s extraordinary “that music can exist in the same world as the basest treachery.”
Gertrude caught my eye. Of course she would be there, but who was that, draped all over her? It seemed to be Gus! Was she trying to stir my jealousy—at my sister’s memorial? I wouldn’t put it past her. Gus was very smiley (especially for a guy at a memorial), and kept a proprietary arm around Gertrude’s shoulders at all times. Bee and I had once joked what a perfect pair these two narcissistic monste
rs would make, but I never expected it to happen! I could see their future, the arts administrator attending openings with triplets strapped to her waist like a suicide bomb, Gus bringing up the rear with a dead rabbit slung over his shoulder: the Bonnie and Clyde of Central Park East.
They’d met recently, it emerged, due to Gus’s assiduous efforts to get hold of me. He’d claimed to be an old pal of mine. What else had he told her? I felt it my duty to draw her aside for a moment.
“You do realize the guy has criminal convictions, right?” I asked her, once we were out of earshot.
“I thought he was a friend of yours!”
“Gertrude, just because I hung out with him as a kid doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. It just means I was too big a coward to get rid of him.”
“Don’t be down on yourself, Harrison.”
“Has he given you the tragic tale of his girlfriend yet—the one who fell down the elevator shaft and is now paralyzed for life?” I could tell that he had. “Very touching, huh? The bit he always leaves out is that he pushed her into it! It was probably an accident, but still.”
She didn’t have a chance to reply—speeches began. Bee’s dealer was up on the platform, telling everybody what he thought of Bee, in hindsight. He seemed to have hopes of turning her into a pillar of the art establishment. In aid of this, he portentously listed her various artistic stages: the interlocking cardboard stage, the clay monster stage, the assemblages, the installations, the Coziness Sculptures, and the recent ecstatic aquatic figures in stone, which he (predictably) considered a “culmination” of something or other. He made her sound like Picasso! He also viewed Bee’s time in Can’t-Bury as hugely productive (not exactly how I saw it). I was getting a bit sick of him, and was pleased when a woman who’d been at RISD with Bee objected to the dealer’s use of the word, “subversive,” in connection with the Coziness Sculptures.
“Subversive of what?” she asked. “The only thing they subvert is our downgrading of pleasure, and the dismissal of anything female and domestic as childish, trivial and unpatriotic. They’re not!” Cheers from the crowd.