But she did stop.
He saw her turn back to look at them, the way a seal’s head pokes up sporadically to eyeball a human on shore.
And then she swam back to them.
She left the water cold and shivering, and he wrapped her in a towel, and she said to him plainly and without the suggestion of drama, “Did you get the shot? Was it okay?” Her lips blue, even as she smiled, a little like a corpse mermaid.
Is their love their art? Are their lives making art?
He stares at the spines of the books in her writing room. He feels she is the other side of things—the balance, the space to his motion, velocity, force. If in him need drives the fist, then in her space receives all action. But it is not a velvety romantic love. It is creative and destructive. He thinks of her body. He wants to fuck the room of her. The whole house.
Suddenly he needs to be in the bedroom. He makes his way upstairs, into the higher-sexed place of their marriage. In their bedroom he sees deep burgundy and indigo sheets in wrestled piles on the bed. He can smell their sex. Dead candles, waiting for dusk and sex, hide in the shadows. On the wall above where her sleeping head should be there are black-and-white photographs of . . . what? Him and his wife. Right? Taken by their photographer friend, lovingly. Right? He pauses and his eyes fall on them, on their revelation, on their presence. Two-dimensional selves in giant oak frames, perfectly square. The photo of her: wife half underwater, half surfaced, seal-like and caught off guard. Her hair splayed out like seaweed. The photo of him: a fighting scene, his own arm extending mid motion in blur, half his face in the frame, half not, the object of the blow entirely out of the shot. He looks at the two images, caught there like that above the world of the bed, and wonders what he is really looking at. Is it true? His chest hurts some. He steadies himself by sitting on the edge of the bed.
His hands rummage around in the bedside table drawer. He isn’t looking. He’s feeling. The aqua glass pipe finds his hand. And the pot inside a plastic bag, just like in anyone’s house. The perpetual life of the lighter finding his fingers. In this way he is able to breathe like a normal fucking man again. He fills his lungs with haze and lift and the promise of the rational mind’s loosening. He misses his son. His body aches for his wife. Thoughtless and animal heavy. Come home, he thinks, like a mantra. Swim home.
Alone, in their house, without her, he does what men do when they are not crying. He puts his beautifully violent face in his own hands and hangs his head and his shoulders heave. Something like silent pantomime crying. And then it breaks through him, guttural sounds, and then the sounds grow into moans and then he’s throwing the glass pipe at the photo of himself and shattering glass all over the place. Goddamn it. Nothing nothing nothing but this: he cannot save her, fix her, make it right. There is nothing he can do but love his son and love his wife and wait. He sits up on the edge of the bed.
What is a man without action?
He drops his head, defeated.
That is when he sees it, down beyond his scabbed and roughened hands resting on his thighs, past his battered knees balling up in front of him, all the way down to his feet planted helplessly there on the hardwood floor. The edge of a book jutting out quietly from beneath the bed. Without thinking he reaches down and picks it up. It is not a published book, like the rows and rows that fill their home. It is not one of her books, and yet it is most definitely her book. It is a book people write in when they mean for it to be kept out of the world. It is a journal. Its cover burnished red and worn. A leather strap wrapped and wrapped around it. A pen periscoping up from the top.
Quietly as a child he opens the book, looks at pages randomly. Flipping through. Her novel. The one she’s writing . . . was writing. Pieces of stories, little drawings and notes, and whole pages of narrative. He stops on a page and starts to read, with only the moon for light:
The Girl
You must picture your image of Eastern Europe.
In your mind’s eye.
Whatever that image is.
However it came to you.
Winter.
That white.
One winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other. It is a year after the blast that has atomized her entire family in front of her eyes. It is a house she has lived in with a widow woman who took her in—orphan of war, girl of nothingness. . .
He stops reading for a minute. He feels like he knows the girl. He feels like he can see her. Has he read this before? No, that’s impossible. He looks down again and reads on, and in the reading he begins to see images in frames:
On the ninth day the widow takes the food straight to the girl. She squats down on the ground. The girl immediately starts to point to her creations and name them. The woman nods. They eat carrots. When the girl is finished naming, the woman points to a smooth blue-gray stone, which seems to inhabit a forest of sticks.
Vilkas, the girl says.
Wolf.
On the tenth day the girl finishes the city and enters the widow’s house.
Inside, the house is filled with books and photographs. Books and books from all places and all times. Old history books with spines reddish brown like old blood, more recently published books with the sheen and glow of the West. Oversize books and palm-size books, every color imaginable, titles filling the room like voices. Books and photographs, more books and photographs than dishes or furniture. Photographs of Paris and Germany, of America, Poland, Prague, Moscow. Photographs of crowds in squares, their coats and hats testaments to cold, photos of farmers and villagers, their faces plump and red as apples as they break from the fields for something to eat and drink. Photographs of animals caught entering or emerging from the forest, their animal faces wary and low to the ground, their animal eyes marking the distance between species. Books and photographs of trees and houses and festivals, of musicians and artists and mothers, of statesmen and children, of soldiers and guns and tanks and bodies and snow made red. Books and books about art. Photographs of the widow. Of her hands. Her cheek and hair. The white of her collar and the nape of her neck. Photos taken by her husband who was arrested, beaten, and stolen away to a Siberian prison.
The widow broken by loss and the girl with the blown-to-bits family begin to live together in this house made of art.
This house made of art.
His heart is pounding. His head is pounding. No—it’s the door. It’s someone at the front door. At first he’s frozen, stuck in the snow-covered story of a girl inside the words of his wife. Then he’s back in his own house in the dark. He tucks the journal underneath an arm and moves toward sound and action.
Moving Action
It’s the poet. At the door. The filmmaker can see her face through the thick-paned glass. He opens it. The night air nearly snaps his psyche in two.
She rubs her cropped thatch of hair and the leather of her black biker jacket makes an ache sound.
He embraces her. The hug is awkward, the journal still under his arm. The poet’s body feels to him like it is alive in a way that his is not. Like she’s filled with current.
The poet twitches away from him, and moves into the house. “Are you going to turn a light on, or do you just want to sit in the dark like we’re in a movie?” she says.
“Sorry. I’m just . . .”
“Exhausted?”
The filmmaker turns on a lamp. The room honeys-over in hue. He goes into the kitchen to retrieve his wife’s bottle of Balvenie scotch. He hands the bottle to the poet. She thanks him, then proceeds to drink straight from the bottle. He sees her neck screen size: the muscles are filmable, her head tilted back and back in the way of a real drinker. He likes her masculinity. They get along.
She stares at the thick of him. “Would you like to just sit here together, or do you feel like talking?” She pulls a fattie and a lighter out of her black leather jacket pocket, wets it between her lips, lights
up, and hands it to him.
He doesn’t say anything, but he holds it up between them with a quizzical look on his face that asks, Customs?
She shakes her head. “Got it on this side. The orderly was holding.”
He’s glad she’s here. The poet on their couch across from him, as if things were the way they’re supposed to be.
“We have to do something,” she says. Her words echo through his body.
The filmmaker smashes his empty beer bottle onto the coffee table in front of them. The sound tightens the cords in the poet’s neck and jaw, but she doesn’t flinch.
Silence.
The filmmaker sets the journal down on the table as if this whole night is moving normally. How does anyone survive any relationship? How does anyone move through humans without killing them, or themselves?
The two of them stare at the object.
“Yeah. I don’t know,” the filmmaker says. “This is hers. I don’t know if there’s anything in there that matters. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”
“Lemme see it.” The poet holds out her hand.
The filmmaker opens the journal to the part he was reading before and hands it to the poet. He puts his head in his hands, for he feels as if it might sever from his neck at any moment. Partly he wishes it just would. The second the poet’s voice begins, the writer’s story rises up to them something like heat does, invisible and under the spell of physics. She reads the writer’s words aloud:
One day the girl is reading a poem in the widow’s house. Next to the poem is a drawing of the poet: Walt Whitman. Next to the drawing the girl’s imagination retrieves something it has not touched for a long while. A father. The girl’s father before the blast was a poet. There. It is a thought, “father,” it is the thought, “poet,” and it does not kill her. The girl closes her eyes and fingers her tangles of blond hair and goes back, perhaps for the first time, to the memory of her father, her family before the blast.
Her father was a poet, her mother a weaver. Her father could engineer and build anything with only his hands, her mother could sing and make medicines and calm a child into dream—everything they were, happened between their hands. Her father taught her poems, and how to build a tiny city from mud and straw and twigs. Her mother taught her songs and how to make a pattern with cloth and color. And there was a brother. She lets the word become an idea. Brother. She remembers the touch of his hands. The warmth they shared when their cheeks met. How he smelled next to her before they drifted into sleep at night. Her mother the weaver. Her father the poet. Her other: brother.
She looks back at the image of Walt Whitman. She wonders, is a poet really a poet if his only songs are to his daughter, his wife, his son? If his extraordinary lyric merely puts children to sleep like moon whisper, or fills a house with star-shaped dreams? Is a poet a poet if there are no books that carry his words, his name, a drawing of his face?
She is the not-dead daughter of her father the poet.
In her memory she is four. She is on her father’s shoulders in the darkened woods, next to a frozen lake. They skirt the woods without completely entering; forest animals scrutinize their movements. She is laughing, and that’s how she remembers it: she is holding tight to her father’s ears, he is saying, “Not so tight, my tiny, not so tight, you will pull your father’s ears from his head!” Her laughter and his.
Is it love to want to die there, inside that image?
The not-dead daughter.
Later, her father creates an oral history of that moment, tells and tells it around great fires after dinners, after work, after the tiny family—a wife, a son, a daughter—has settled and touched one another and drunk and moved between house smells and fire. For something else happened there besides her love for him. Her knees pressed against his cheeks. A story. A story about animals.
“A caribou was walking against the forest next to a frozen lake with his family. The youngest fell lame and the mother, who was already weakened from childbirth, insisted on carrying her. The mother became weaker and weaker, and at some point was so delirious with fatigue that she let slip the tiny life, into the great flattened white of things. A human girl and her father came upon the tiny thing just as it was dying. The girl held its head and the father sang a very old song with his eyes closed. It was what to do. Then she died.”
And her father narrates the ending in song, lyric. But the girl’s imagination . . . travels.
In her head, the girl continued her own story beyond the ending of the father and daughter who came upon the dying animal. In her story, the girl wonders, What was the last thing the youngest caribou saw? Was it the image of her animal father and her animal mother disappearing into blur and ice? Or perhaps by chance she saw her, her and her father, before she passed. If it was the strong back of her animal father and the tender rhythm of her animal mother’s legs she saw, maybe her leaving took a home with it forever. And if it was the human father and daughter she saw last, perhaps the difference in their species melted as snow in a great thaw, the word she and the word her becoming each other, daughter and caribou, perhaps their beating of hearts simply became the earth’s cadence, perhaps bodies returned to their animal past—hand and hoof releasing to the energy of matter.
She loves the story, this story her father told and told before her family was blown to bits—their bodies exploding back to molecules and light and energy. Fatherless, beautiful story poem.
It becomes a story she loves to death.
The not-dead daughter.
It is the story of children.
The poet puts the last of the joint out in the palm of her hand. “How long has she been writing this?”
The filmmaker answers, “About seven years.”
But then the front door cracks open and the playwright flutters in like an enormous unstoppable moth. “Listen,” he yell-breathes.
The filmmaker stands up.
“They said they . . . ,” he sputters.
The filmmaker walks to the playwright and wordlessly grabs him by his arms, briefly lifting him slightly off the ground.
“They said they don’t know if she will make it through the night. They’re trying to determine if she took something. They won’t know until morning. They said come back when the sun comes up. They said this should be over by then. One way or another.” His words dissolve into breathing.
We have to do something.
The filmmaker lets go of the playwright and heads back out the front door, grabbing his car keys from a table. The front door swings behind him, open as a mouth.
The playwright stares at the poet, and at the broken glass, as they listen to the sound of a husband peeling out of his own driveway and neighborhood.
The poet cradles the writer’s journal like a child.
The playwright holds his own arms. “What should we do?”
The poet stares past him into the night. Then she turns her gaze to the living room wall, there in the writer and filmmaker’s house, the house where they’ve all come to know one another, the wall with the photo they’ve all seen.
She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.
The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.
The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world
“I know what’s happened,” the poet says.
Expression
When the girl paints a red face, with orange streaks shooting from the eyes and mouth, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you angry?”
When the girl paints an indigo face, with aqua eyes and a green mouth, with hair like sea grass, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you swimming?”
When the girl paints a bright yellow face, with bright blue eyes and gold hair splaying out like the rays of the sun, the widow asks,
“Is that your face? Are you happy?”
And when the girl paints a black face with a crimson gash interrupting the eye, the nose, the mouth, nearly dissecting the image, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Is that your fear?”
It is only when the girl paints a face that looks like a girl’s, expressionless, flat, calm, just a girl looking out, not a smile but not the negation of one either, that the widow stops asking the girl about the faces. The widow smiles and hangs the painting of the quiet, calm girl on the wall in the common room.
The girl goes back to her labor. Every color alive.
Hundreds of faces on wood—as if a forest of faces could come alive.
The Painter
It’s three A.M. He’s thirsty. His jaw hurts where the fucking filmmaker tried to knock it off his face. He’s lying next to the performance artist on a futon in her loft. She brought him home with her from the hospital, and not the first time. They’ve been doing it for years. The rest of the gang may have exiled him from their little posse, but not her. As long as he stays away from them, away from the woman who used to be his wife, there’s not a goddamn thing they can say or do.
Whatever. He looks around the performance artist’s room. She’s snoring. He needs to not think. Badly. He reaches for a half-empty bottle of wine on the bedside table and drinks the rest in a single motion. He stares at the blank wall. He gets up. The naked man pads into the kitchen, finds another bottle of wine, opens it, brings it back to the bedroom. Drinks half. He rifles through some CDs there on the floor, finds The Doors. He sticks it in the CD player. Volume low. Sleeping, sexed-up woman. He finishes the bottle. He lies back down.
The Small Backs of Children Page 6