by Martha Ronk
Glass Grapes
He knows I like things that break, and so the Indian pots and recently the thin glasses or vases hand-blown you can get from the antique store nearby or even, although this seems particularly useless and fragile, the glass fruits you find from time to time abandoned in the back in dusty bins: grapes, pears, apples. You hold their cool transparency in your hands. Yet for all their fragility they are there, straddling that imperceptible border between, well, being there and not. You can see them and in the case of tumblers, see through them. I especially like the pale green grapes, well almost anything that feels as if it could simply blow apart in your hands if you squeezed just a bit too hard, not on purpose, mind you, but just without thinking or without pretending to think. I have quite a collection now because he is good at finding whatever his object of affection seems to want. He has a gift of generosity, unable really not to think of what someone might like.
I’ve known people who can never think what to get for someone else or even those who can’t think what to get for themselves and stand baffled at store counters, in malls, but he is, without really putting his mind to it, able to hit on just the right thing. He knew before I did that I liked things that were temporary and tangential, things that seemed about to evaporate and lift off, as if some particular view of life were being confirmed as I undid the paper wrappings. That’s another of his gifts, really, his ability to size one up and know what one wants, to improve one’s lot in life, to cook exactly the bit one would especially enjoy, to say exactly the right thing at a moment when things seem perfect already, to plan exactly the right outing for an occasion or to make an occasion when there isn’t any. Most of my friends muddle along, forgetting sometimes or remembering to pick up a paperback for one’s birthday, and I think of one of my favorite poems by Frank O’Hara where he tells which books he snatched for his hosts before getting on the 7:15 train, not the New World Writing, but Verlaine, all before Billie Holiday died and before he remembers leaning on the john at the 5 SPOT. He stopped breathing, listening to her sing.
I’m sitting on the stool in his kitchen, leaning on the marble counter with my drink, neat; I always take it neat. He’s not home yet and he always makes dinner, so there’s not much for me to do except balance on the stool, an uncomfortable if highly designed stool, and wait. I’m thinking and if it can be called thinking, thinking about this glass, glass grapes and other things. When I come home from work and classes, he’s always made dinner and put flowers about and planned an extra something in the form of a caramelized pear for dessert and waiting for me to ask for something. Isn’t there anything you want, he says, and he smiles the smile of the generous. He’s younger than I am, but somehow despite that and my inability to reciprocate in kind, he’s chosen me and all I have to do is figure out how to be grateful.
But I think, what is this generosity, you know how you wonder when you are drinking. What is it and what does it mean? Once I said I didn’t need a camera but he said I would if I didn’t at the moment, that I’d want to record a trip one day and then he arranged for the trip and indeed I was grateful as we traveled to Santa Fe to record the ruins and monuments and stones. I took pictures of pots, cracked, repaired, fissured. It was hard not to love him, so I did. No one had ever been so generous to me. In my own family the niggardly were viewed as the blessed and the meek were closer to God.
Mother hummed hymns while she did the dishes. So growing up I grew certain of the certitudes of giving up and cutting back. I have few clothes, but he, he has so many shirts you’d have to think of Gatsby and even on holiday he has suitcases full of shirts of so many colors and shades of the same color, so beautiful that like Daisy when I first saw them, I wanted to remember how to cry.
Why he is able to get it all right is beyond me and why he has chosen me as the recipient of all his efforts and special insights is also beyond me. I’m not any more attractive than the next person, certainly not in a category matching his own, and generally, except when the glow he projects is projected back at him, he must feel I’m a disappointment no matter how hard I try and, of course, I do try, anyone would, caught in the golden bubble of his generosity. And it’s not as if he is simply extravagant as I’ve explained. No, he’s deft and sensitive and gets me exactly what he is right to think I would want even, as I said before, before it is clear to me but then, of course, it is clear to me and he is absolutely right that I should have been wearing green, collecting glass grapes, going to school all along.
In psychological terms I’d have to say it is hard to figure him out, I mean why would anyone devote his life to it, and I hope simply to continue to be able to remain grateful. I wonder, though, in the back of my mind if I’ll fail. I try, of course, to reciprocate in small ways with whatever means I can, a paperback here and a bottle of wine there. I replanted his indoor plants and saved up for a terra cotta pot for the ficus. And I’m happy to be grateful. But it can’t be enough. Not that he would ever say so—he doesn’t, I think, even notice the inequity—but that I am always behind. No matter what I contrive for him, I am always behind. He says he just likes to see me smile. Just likes to see me happy and I am happy, and smiling is the easiest thing in the world. He says life is just to be made a bit easier for those he loves and he does love me. He finds me charming and so long as I don’t think about it, it’s ok, but I worry, what if I forget to do it or can’t be charming or try, one day, just a bit too hard so that it is altogether not charming but something else.
I couldn’t ask for anything more or for more generosity or, and this is perhaps the most important, exquisite tact. He never overdoes it, really. He is careful to make sure that the gifts come when they should come or that they pick me up when I am blue, although I find lately that I rarely allow myself a mood for fear of eliciting a favor. He wants the world to be a good and beautiful place and he wants me to believe it. Some people want to construct faith in others. It is their purpose in life to get others to believe, in what I’m not exactly sure, but in something, not God perhaps but in the possibility of things, abundance and overflow. All this sounds, I’m sure you think, rather silly and superficial but I don’t mean it that way. And it’s not simply their good manners or lack of irony. It’s more of a mission. The opposite of pulling the rug out from under you and we’ve all known those who do that.
He says I just haven’t opened myself to the world. It’s not that he imagines himself as virtuous; his efforts don’t extend to institutions or even to theories about the distribution of wealth or to each according to his needs. He simply wants to straighten things up a bit in the corner he’s been given. He’s an optimist. He thinks things will work out for the best, even believes in progress, an idea I thought long ago relegated to the nineteenth century along with winged bronze statues. He takes pleasure in thinking up treats: raspberries and cream, apple tarts, glass grapes. He knows what each of us would like or would like to like if we thought about it.
I’m tired of thinking. The corners of my mouth are tired. I don’t mind being grateful, certainly not. I am grateful. I try not to draw attention to myself or complain. If I should forget and ask for something, there it is, too large, too colorful, too exactly what I wanted sitting in front of me wrapped in tissue, spoken in soft tones, thrown about my shoulders. How can one possibly complain about getting what one wants. The small glass glints in the sun. So what if my position could be described by an outsider who can’t possibly understand as compromised. Besides, whose isn’t in some way or other? That’s what I ask myself over and over again. I sit on the stool in the kitchen and review the possibilities. It’s not as if I’m having to perform or even that he asks too often for me to be charming. I like to sit with a basket of glass in my lap. I do, I really do like it. I like to smile over at him while he’s cutting things, apples and bananas for fruit salad, Cointreau and sugar over the top. I like to pick up the glass grapes and hold them to the light while I’m reading, a sort of dare really and in spite of my concentration o
n the book in front of me I haven’t lost track yet, haven’t broken any. Once one came loose and rolled to the floor, rolled into the corner and came to rest. I like to think sometimes of them breaking and then reforming as if the film were running backwards, as if they were dissolving into bits of light right in my hand and then molding ever so slowly into rounded shapes. The grapes are strung on a silver wire. There are eight of them.
Only once in a while and really never for very long do I feel as if I’ve been asked for more than is required, due him really. He is so much more generous than I, than I could ever be. And he understands the position I’m in, understood it really before I did. Yet, lately, sitting on this stool and drinking my drink, I’ve simply felt like being hateful. I have no cause. I wake in a bath of sunlight. Yet the idea of something petty and mean edges into view, you know, just to do it. Once I drove someone who loved me off by putting my hand through a window. There, I said, now you have to go away and I went by myself to the emergency room and had the glass picked out and the hand stitched up. It was a hateful thing to do. And the worst part was I was glad. That’ll show him, I thought. That’ll show them all. “I won’t.” But what I wouldn’t is no longer clear to me, only the array of doctors and pills and endless, endless hours.
This time I’d rather not. It’s such a price to pay for proving one’s point. There are the sleepless nights and hallucinations and fear. I can’t, I think, bear the little weasely shadows slithering the walls. Just to prove a point and what sort of point is it to prove really that one isn’t charming, won’t ever be charming, hates the idea of being charming. Or to prove that things are not rosy. What’s the point of that, I ask myself when things are rosy. He says that he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I know he’s right. I try to remember to smile as Patsy must have when Frank brought her the Verlaine. But I open my mouth and the corners crack. I wonder if I like green after all. I wonder if I like seeing through things so much. As a child, my mother says, I ate sand from the sandbox and refused lunch. I am sitting at the stool in the kitchen. On the radio for the anniversary of the moon landing the announcer plays an old tape of an astronaut from over thirty years ago reading from the Bible: “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
The Sofa
To choose to take someone into your life is an act of supreme willpower. It’s a decision too large to contemplate, and I can’t even get in the car without thinking about the moment between staying and leaving and dropping everything in a scatter on the garage floor and picking it up and wishing just to have to pick it up for some time so I don’t have to decide anything else, but just concentrate on this one thing—keys and wallet and books, and the lipstick rolling under the wheels as it does.
On that very day of the lipstick my best friend decides to take a lover. She tells me about the joys of living with someone, the coziness of it all, and how he and she do this and that together, and shop and cook meals together, side by side, rhapsodic in the kitchen with the tile he bought from a wrecking company and put in himself. She’s chosen him all right and says everything will be perfect, so she says. She says it is just as if it were all meant to be just as I am cramming everything back into my purse and getting in my car and closing the door.
I ask her via e-mail why she is so taken with this new arrangement and why, given her gifts at irony, she needs be so over-the-top. I mean she’s not that young. She writes she is hurt by my questions and asks why I would do such a thing. But I ask, myself now, not her, what is this thing called love anyhow, what makes people choose each other in the first place, choose each other out of all the others they might choose and go about ordering dinners and designing kitchens with green concrete counters and picking out a car under fluorescent lights on a Friday night along the wide boulevard of cars and balloons and treat it as something fated. As if it were a given that you had to go hand in hand to an architecturally significant hotel and hole up for days poking around old neighborhoods looking for architecturally significant doorways or bridges or even the Toledo and Ohio Railroad station in Columbus as if you just had to.
Also I can’t see eating with someone else on a regular basis, child or lover or whatever. It’s so intrusive really I don’t know why others choose to do it but they do. Kids throw food around and dinner is a disaster and lovers take note of your imperfections like closing your eyes when you’re thinking hard about what to say until you can’t eat then either. Perhaps, I think, people adopting other people is the definition of what it means to be human or else I’ve lived too long by myself and although I realize this doesn’t exactly follow I think it anyway. These people have taken on other people as if it were natural, or as if, despite its unnaturalness, they take it on and make it a fact, and then insist on it, either by full embrace or by elaborate questioning of what they have done, neither of which makes any difference since it is what they have done. She writes me a cryptic response and then signs off: It was meant to be.
What I think about these choices doesn’t much matter since no one wants my opinion and since I have no lover or child of my own and wouldn’t want to, really I wouldn’t want to have anyone intruding in my daily life, I mean it’s so hard to do the things one has to do without having to think about someone else. Yet I do think about them, because the choosing stands out, the arbitrary and insistent shape of it. Everything would have been so different if the choice hadn’t been made. One might have written a book about brain surgery, arranged gazebos and Buddha heads in the back yard, made a documentary film about a mad gardener who wears bells on his shoes so as not to startle his neighbors at 4 A.M. when he comes to trim the bushes.
They’ve just come back from a trip, this couple, and have had good meals and a good time. The paintings in the museum interested one more than the other. One of them doesn’t much care for architecture and I have to agree though no one asked me. Architecture is such an imposition on the world, too opinionated and abrupt, but again, if you’ve ever met an architect, you’ll know what I mean. They take over corners like someone has moved in and camped out in your living room without thinking and pushed things around like the sofa so you can’t recognize where you are anymore or even who you are, things are so rearranged and without even asking. Even your taste gets questioned and if you buy a large mirror perfect for over the mantel, copper and hammered with bright nails, he seems hurt and refuses to hang it or just lets the moment pass until it has been sitting in your closet for months and doesn’t listen to what you have to say about it then or ever.
But on the trip, my friend says, she cared what he thought and he cared what she thought and not only about architecture. What I mean is that they choose to ask about what the other one thinks and then they ask pointed questions about what you think and then they talk about it. He was a jewel, she tells me more times than she tells me about the Carpaccio and the martyrdom of Saint Ursula. You’ll like him so much, she says and arranges for us to meet for dinner and she hangs on him and chooses that moment to lift her left foot so that she needs his arm for balance, and says how charming he is right there in front of him and makes it seem as if no one else is charming and no one has ever done what she’s done before.
What does it mean to be so agog about another person who ought to be just furniture, what I mean is, ought to blend in so to speak, not to be tended to but taken for granted, like your brown sofa you don’t much notice until a stray cat from the neighborhood gets in and scratches it to bits and you realize now that you see it that you don’t like it much, thank goodness since it is ruined.
Do I e-mail her back and tell her it’s no good displaying someone else for the world or expecting the world to sit up and take notice of someone as if that someone were not just a man one has chosen for oneself, but a bona fide phenomenon. Perfection is overrated really even if the person does have perfect taste, you feel a bit shoved in the corner, you know, like when I’d chosen the bathroom sconces myself and they did seem right to m
e at the time. Maybe it’s better not to speak about one’s choices over and over but just to let them be, the choices one has made, I mean, and get on with it. Like my not choosing anything really for some time now or trying not to, although how one can try not to choose isn’t clear to me and isn’t something I’d quite thought of until now.
Of course I don’t write saying all this to her, any more than I tell her that she needs please to stop talking to me as if I were a child, selfish and unable to accommodate anyone or stand any sort of change, since of course she needs to talk to me this way and who cares really except for thinking about why someone younger would talk to someone older in this way which of course I know the answer already and find it mildly annoying but not so much as to do anything about it.
I mean what can you do when someone thinks they know it all and have made a perfect choice. Although you may be thinking about how I need advice when I go about carelessly dropping everything in the garage and all and how I let the cat get in and why were my doors wide open in the first place and I deserve to have a ruined sofa.