“That’s what I’ll have. Two of those,” says Erica, “and a glass of malbec.”
She regrets having come on this hike, but a lazy regret, a regret that is barely a thought. She could’ve stayed in the hotel and waited for Colin by the fire in the reading room. Last night, while he slept, she found some ladybugs in the heater and his satchel under the bed. What interesting, boring things he had: a broken shard in a plastic box, a pair of headphones, a condom, a passport (Colin Sohlberg Holloway, three entry stamps to Spain and one to Morocco, and no USA), and an insubstantial novel with “For C” and a woman’s name signed on the title page, dated a few months back. She likes this—Colin is, or has been, at least, desired.
“You bet. Remember my words, never go without a bra,” says Saskia, gracelessly scrambling over a deadfall. “When I was pregnant, I slept with mine on. I say nonsense to bra politics. Bras are purely a practical matter.”
“In the age of universal bralessness,” says Erica, “disenfranchisement is frowned upon, though in Vermont and Maine, felons aren’t allowed to vote unless they put their bras back on.”
“That’s right,” says Saskia (who can’t have been listening carefully), hesitating over a puddle.
March air stings through Erica’s sweatshirt, jacket, and bra—no undershirt, no tights beneath her jeans.
“We came here last spring for Michael to check out the grounds, before the hotel was built,” Saskia says.
“First time Colin’s ever brought me here, and I forgot to check the weather. I thought it’d be warmer already. So I’m stuck wearing Colin’s ugly sweater,” Erica lies. The sweater is ugly and hers.
It’s often important to Erica to disagree, ideologically, with men she fucks. With women, it is not so difficult to form attachments either way: at peace, at war, even in a vacuum of ideas. Or so, at least, she likes to say about herself, and self-analysis is a leaky ship with every kind of spoiled cargo.
“I can lend you stuff, if you want. My husband is the head engineer for the whole thing, you know.”
“Sinks last,” says Erica.
Sinks like fossil shells, seaside rock pools, sinks with surfaces like frozen waves. Colin is contracted to install the sinks in the hotel, sinks he’s designed.
“Sometimes it’s those last touches that make a household,” says Saskia.
They are pleasantly, unpleasantly united as women of men involved in the serious business of building things in a world with harsh weather.
“I have a bouclé skirt you could borrow. Of course, it’ll be too big for you. This, here, is from my first one,” she spanks her hip. “And this,” she pats the belly of her quilted jacket, “from my second. I still have a huge disgusting cyst in here.”
“Why don’t you have it removed?”
“I’d never do elective surgery. It’s unreasonable and expensive, darling.” There’s a rip in Saskia’s eye, where the iris bleeds into the eye white. “The only time I was skinny was when I starved myself in the period leading to our wedding. I was so committed, I considered eating tapeworm eggs, you know, like Callas, like Maria Callas, until I heard tapeworms could multiply. I wasn’t going to become a love nest for worms. Not yet, I thought. I settled on pickles and low-fat cottage cheese. We went on our honeymoon to Hawaii. All my clothes were baggy and I was stuck in my bikini. Your hips expand during childbirth. It’s scientific, you’ll see. You’re young, still. Let me tell you this, when we first saw you in the restaurant yesterday, I said to Michael that you and Colin would create great-looking offspring. I couldn’t stop looking at your hair, though girls are said to take their hair after the father, unfortunately. Is your color natural?”
Erica’s head is wrapped in scarves. “In high school, I shaved it,” she says, and the trail forks, and the light between the needles is a little colder. “And my father loved it. He patted my head and called me ‘son.’ I think it was minutely detrimental.”
“Sure, but is your color natural?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” says Erica. “But to be natural is such a hard act to keep up.”
They walk close beside one another, with Erica’s one step to Saskia’s one and a half. Dark pines behind them now. The barrens open into three more or less identical perspectives. It’s a choice, but a farcical one. So they stop, and the barrens are quiet.
“Well, we have to follow these, if we can find some more.” Erica points at a cairn on the side of the path, which ends here.
“To what?” Saskia says.
“What?”
“You said it was detrimental. I’m glad I have boys, now that my youngest is past the spray-while-changing-diapers period. Oh boy, have you ever changed a diaper?” With her hands, Saskia suggests unspeakable cornucopias.
“Only on an adult,” Erica thinks, but doesn’t say. This kind of articulated subservience to the body and its products, this belongs to death, communism, middle-class womanhood. One must resist, resist.
“All I’m saying, they’re not as proofed as the manufacturers would have you believe,” says Saskia. “It’s like shampoos. They certainly don’t work.”
“I don’t know, had I not shaved my head, I think I would’ve had more boys. I spent my time all agonized about the lack of fucking,” Erica explains. “I wanted to become the next Simone Weil, you know, starvation, protest, and the whole buffet, although the only thing I was protesting was my lack of popularity. Then there was something Weil had written about beauty being ‘Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter’ or something like that. Then some waiter in a New Orleans café, some waiter called me ‘son,’ and I remember realizing I wasn’t quite a saint, but just an inadvertent cross-dresser.”
As Erica’s been talking, they’ve started out over the barrens, unconsciously continuing in the direction they were facing when the path had ended.
“Or maybe it wasn’t a waiter. Or maybe the waiter was my dad.”
“Your dad was a waiter?”
“A stockbroker,” Erica says.
“Honey. I have no idea what you’re going on and on about.”
“That’s fine,” says Erica.
Saskia’s mouth parts, and no words come out.
Saskia, Erica thinks, a too-elegant name for this being beside her. A name for a porcelain doll, a Dutch royal. Let’s switch. I ought to be Saskia. You can be Erica, Erica the Red, ax-throwing wench of the Vinelandish north.
“When I met Michael, he dressed terribly. A bad sense of fashion, and I mean actively bad, is almost as bad as religion,” says Saskia. “He had a neon shirt, and I found a fanny pack in his office drawer. I was his assistant after college. Soon, we were fucking.” She says the word with stony inattention, like a Protestant talking about the Immaculate Conception. “Just because I had enough imagination to know he’d probably look better naked. We used to do it on a futon in his office.”
“Do you still?”
“What?”
“On a futon in his office?”
“Nah.” Saskia points at her belly, presumably at her “huge disgusting cyst,” like some suburban strip-mall psychic pointing at her crystal ball. “First thing I did once we married, I made him get rid of the fanny pack and the futon.”
Darkness comes evenly here, in the barrens, as if by way of a computer-guided aperture. Perhaps, without Erica noticing, it has become nearly dark.
In her apartment in New York, Erica has heavy gray velvet and blue sheer curtains to effect a state of all-day dawn. The flat stability of noon is not for owls or Erica.
“It’s four. We probably ought to go back,” says Erica, looking at her phone. “It’s weird, my G6 has no reception. Do you have G6 or 7?”
Saskia’s resting. She has spread a scarf on the stone underneath her. “New G7, but I left it in the room … Michael alm
ost killed me on our honeymoon, you don’t even know. He wanted everything to be perfect. He wanted to show me everything, volcano, plantations. He dragged me all over the island on a bus. I had blue curaçao coming out of my ears because it was, you know, inclusive. Michael’d make me finish it each time, before getting up from the table. That was not OK. I didn’t mind telling him that. I was always buzzed … by the end of the trip, all my clothes fit perfectly again.” She laughs. She tightens her shoelaces and gets up. “These are some first-class water-resistant boots. You should get a pair.”
Erica studies the barrens, each of three perspectives, then the pines behind them. “We should just go back the way we came.”
“This is the way back, dear.”
“This?” Erica points at random into the barrens.
“Yep,” says Saskia with confidence.
“Not through the trees?”
“It’s a loop.”
Saskia sets off, Erica following, over the barrens, sporadically hopping a rift or a depression full of snow water. In the distance, the tolts appear man-made, manlike, moai.
“Did you know, Newfoundland is a rock that broke off what is now Spain and Morocco and crashed into the Americas something like 250 million years ago,” Erica says and thinks: “What an annoying thing of me to say.”
“That’s what I said to Michael on our honeymoon, couldn’t you take me somewhere with history? He said he didn’t want to be bothered with the past on our honeymoon. So, where did you and Colin go on yours?”
“What?”
“Honeymoon,” says Saskia, with reverence bordering on the astrological—Honey Moon for those with husbands, Blood Moon for the rest.
“Madrid,” says Erica, surprising herself. This city from Colin’s passport, added last night to her own List of Cities to See Before Senility. She has a notebook of lists: Words, Cheeses, Birthdates, Things to Buy in the Unlikely Event Another Man Leaves Me a Small Part of his Titanic Fortune.
“Really, Spain?” says Saskia, apparently amazed. “Ha! You and the Newfoundland tectonic plate. You must’ve spent all the time at the Prado.”
“We spent a whole week in the hotel room.”
“Can we rest here for a second?” Saskia stops. “In Hawaii, I often felt like I’d rather stay in the room, but you don’t know my husband. He’d never miss a chance at a field trip. Sometimes, he’d take a flask with him and by the time we got wherever we were going, everyone would be singing on the bus. Life of the party, he’s that type. You didn’t even go into the Prado?”
“We talked about it but decided not to.” Erica looks around the dimming barrens with the thinnest, first shadow of alarm. The wrinkled gray terrain repeats. The rock around her feet repeats. This is a cell, she thinks, a structural redundancy inside a massive, ignoramus brain …
“Not even once?” Saskia lowers her rear onto one of the folds in the Moroccan rock.
“Yeah, it takes a different kind of courage not to see some things and places.” Erica thrusts her hands deeper into her jacket. Her gloves are so thin her fingers have begun to tingle.
“But those Titians at the Prado!”
“Right. Colin’s mother couldn’t forgive us either. She wanted photos for her album,” Erica lies. “Are you sure it’s not this way? I think I see some cairns over there.”
Lichen and cracks. They lean over the broken limestone like women in prayer. Up close, the broken stones, the seventh set they’ve stopped to study, are again arranged at random by wind and water, offering nothing more salvific than their minor beauty.
“Jesus Christ, I thought you knew where you were going,” Saskia snaps. She picks up a rock and throws it. It lands a few steps away from them. “I’m hungry. So hungry. I haven’t been so hungry since my last pregnancy, the second trimester.”
Erica feels, in her legs and chest, a freezing calm, a darkening in tandem with the last light leaving as this woman’s mouth continues moving. When it stops, Erica says, “We had the sun on our left for most of the way. It set over there, so we should have it on our right on the way back,” attempting what seems an appropriate analysis, picked up from, where, nature shows? Hopefully not science-fiction shows, but there’s something about touching stones for moss … moss on which side of the stones?
“It did not set there. It set over there.” Saskia points in the opposite direction. “Is your phone still not working?”
“No reception.” Erica shakes her head. “I’m really nearly positive about this way being west. You can see the difference in the darkness of the sky.” She points. “The sun can only have set over there, where there’s still some bluishness.”
“We can always go in two different directions, if you’re so sure of yourself. You seem, in general, very sure of yourself. It must feel like quite a virtue. Jesus Christ, where are technology and men?”
“We have to walk,” Erica says coolly, and begins. “Pretty soon we won’t be able to see anything. Look at the sky. I think it’ll snow.”
“Wait for me. I have something in my eye. It feels like a splinter.”
Saskia squats. Erica pats her head. Formal elements of dreams: starless sky, disorientation. Dreams are evolution’s way of making sure you’ve lived through dozens of disaster drills before the real disaster. It’s begun to snow. Large flakes, like pieces torn from pages.
“My bunion hurts,” says Saskia. “Is this really a path?”
“I’m pretty sure,” says Erica. “It’s an island, so if we continue one way, we’ll hit the coast eventually. There are plenty of fishermen’s villages everywhere.”
Holding hands, they step carefully over the slippery rocks.
“I remember these spruce trees. Or are these pines?”
Erica opens her mouth to say nothing. The air is cold against her gums. They’ve turned around three times already. From time to time, they light the ground with Erica’s phone.
“It’s nine. I can’t believe this. Michael will be worried, so I’m sure he’ll send someone.”
“I’m sure he will,” says Erica. She didn’t tell Colin about the hike. “Don’t worry, we’ll get there. It’s important not to—”
“Of course we’ll get there.”
Erica walks through her visible breath. At the top of a rise in the barrens, she stops and looks to the barely bluer ostensible west. Here at the edge of familiar states of lost control: negative g-force on a plane, getting tumbled in seawater, anesthesia for wisdom teeth.
“By the way,” Saskia says, “Colin’s mother couldn’t have asked for photographs.”
“What?”
“The photographs from the Prado. You don’t know what happened to Colin’s mother?”
“What are you talking about?”
“She died when he was young.” Saskia’s slapping her thighs. “He told us at dinner last night, I don’t know where you were. You have to keep the blood moving in your legs. I guess you, his wife, forgot that detail. Or are you his wife?”
“Oh come on now,” Erica says.
Saskia retakes her hand, and they move in the dark. Saskia’s touch is somehow obscene, like the touch of a stranger’s child, a lost and overweight one.
“Well, are you or are you not?”
“Colin’s wife? It’s not that interesting. We met several days ago in a hotel bar in St. John’s, if you must know.”
Saskia stops and releases Erica’s hand.
“This is not the time to be upset over trifles, you know,” Erica says.
“I demand the entire truth or I won’t go any farther with you. I won’t be lost in the snow with someone I don’t trust. That’s not OK.”
In the light from a low moon, an arcade of pines is defined at the base of a slope of bare limestone, a few hundred meters ahead. This is the second phase of being lost—first everything looks the same, and then each place se
ems without precedent, even if you walked through it an hour ago.
“Colin told me he was a Marxist and a sink designer for upscale hotels and houses.” Her voice is a half whisper, and Saskia moves along with her, docile, quiet. “When I pointed out the inconsistency of his position, he said, ‘Even the rich need to wash their hands. I give them a way to absolve themselves,’ and he didn’t say that really, something like that. I thought he was a sanctimonious fool. I thought, why not. We took the private hotel plane to come here later that night.”
“Well, I don’t know why you couldn’t just tell me that. Why you had to be so, I don’t know, inauthentic.”
Then a long, stubborn quiet. The sky has a dark, open, deep anti-urban quality that resists observation. One must study one’s footing, the way ahead. Saskia’s rubber-reinforced uglies are superior to Erica’s leaking leather city boots, approximately the same size.
“I don’t think it’s authenticity,” says Erica dully, automatically, “but an issue of what’s immediately repeatable, relatable. We spent one night together, but by morning I knew he had told me every interesting thing he had. Most people only have one night of interesting things. I wasn’t sure, though, and maybe I wanted to carry the situation to its fullest emotional contradiction, with you, I mean, by telling you I’d married him, to test myself.”
They walk on something like a path now, possibly the one on which they came, but neither have remarked at it. Perhaps because we know it may not be a path. What makes a path? Is belief in a path a productive or destructive action? Her feet are wet. It’s 1990 in Wyoming—after skiing, her feet are aloft in her mother’s hands. She blows on Erica’s toes, to blow “death away.” You “blew it away” with birthday candles and with practice CPR. Her father used to yell at her mother. Don’t say superstitious things then, if you don’t want me to yell at you.
“—no consideration for my feelings, or for his. You’ve already dismissed him. Well, it’s not OK. People have feelings, and people are real, they have other values than …” Saskia’s muttering comes in and out. She seems aware she’s talking to herself. This may well be a path. “You have to know. No, that’s not it, you don’t get it. You just don’t, you don’t.”
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 35