by Sarah Reith
The John grew a mustache and goatee, which he tended like a hothouse full of orchids, and which made him look disreputable—but only like the villain in a children’s movie, easily vanquished and bristling with endearing neuroses. He installed himself in a spidery black ergonomic desk behind a large computer screen. It was comical and sinister, indicative of dark disorders. It was exactly the kind of furniture a Disney-generated malefactor would use. Presently, he forgot the primary purpose of whores and became the avuncular confidante of several young women my mother was mentoring. “I like to keep my hand in,” she explained. I did not ask her what she meant by that, mostly because I knew she would tell me if I did.
I reached a point where the sound of my own husband’s breathing filled my heart with hate. I began to drink fizzy pink cocktails that made me feel like I had high-heeled Playboy bunny slippers on both sides of my brain. When The John went lobster diving with an American-born Chinese/Thai contortionist who called herself Dim Sum, I finally had enough.
I had been loved—I thought—by a man who was not moved by ordinary temptations. He taught yoga and drank tea with scholars of obscure religions. In an age of greed and easy money, he joined a tiny underground community that bartered goods for services; where people knew the names of springtime flowers and raised chickens in their backyards in Oakland and held forums on how to eradicate racism.
I married him without due diligence. But that was not the biggest mistake I made. If I wanted a shoulder to cry on, the dumbest thing I could have done was go crying to my mother.
I should have known immediately, by the way she occupied the seat across from mine. We were in the kitchen of the home she bought herself, when my father left her for a younger more beautiful woman. We were sitting at a table she had carried on her back from a garage sale where a dead man’s heirs knew nothing about the value of his things. The walls were painted with colors Caitlin Swift had mixed, and the windowpanes were made of beveled glass with ripples in them. Glass, essentially, is slow-moving water. If you wait long enough, say, a hundred years, you will begin to see it swirl and run.
“What did you expect?” my mother asked me, when I’d poured out my tale of woe.
“I’m supposed to expect him to hop on a boat and go lobster diving with a contortionist?” I asked, just to make sure.
My mother smiled briefly. “It is the season. Tell me about this contortionist. What’s her name?”
“Karen,” I said. “Karen Lau. She’s—”
My mother waved her hand. Her bracelets flashed. “No. What you said before.”
“She calls herself Dim Sum,” I muttered. “It’s supposed to be a joke. Because you can have as much as you want of so many different things. It sounds like an insult, right? I mean, she says that to a couple of white people, and we’re supposed to laugh? Like racial fetishes are funny or something. It’s so awkward.”
My mother was looking at me like she’d never seen me before. “And you think a white guy who collects Japanese swords might not have a tiny bit of a race thing going on? Let me ask you this: did you ever even try to find out? Did you—”
“That is so shallow,” I protested. “And anyway, Dim Sum isn’t even Japanese. I don’t think she’s ever been near—”
“She’s highly intelligent, is what she is,” my mother interrupted. She had clearly designated herself the dispenser of racist stereotypes for the day. “She knows how to do her research. She’s not squeamish—” She held up her bracelets again, to forestall another interruption. They rattled up and down her forearm. “She knows how to pay attention.” The bracelets went silent.
“Pay attention to what?” I asked in the hush.
“Let me ask you a few more things,” my mother replied. “Why do you think your husband went on this trip with this woman?”
“I didn’t have the money to rent the gear,” I admitted.
Part of our marital program of equality and respect involved keeping separate finances. By that time, The John had signed on as a finish carpenter with a highly respected construction company in Marin. I was taking classes at City College and working as a barista at a coffee shop that also sold Beanie Babies and collector’s editions of Pee-Wee Herman dolls.
“Did you know Dim Sum was going to be on that trip?” she asked softly.
“I don’t care about Dim Sum,” I replied indignantly. “She talks in this squeaky stupid voice around men, and when it’s just us, she sounds like she’s been chewing rocks. She’s so obvious.”
“Karen’s hilarious,” my mother murmured. “I thought you’d like her. Look. I think what happened is this: Karen’s playing with you. She’s testing you. She wants to be your friend, and I told her you had a little more mettle than this. Maybe I was just projecting.” She looked at me closely again.
“I don’t think I really need a friend who finds it hilarious to walk around in a gold lamé bikini in front of my husband,” I retorted. “And I don’t think I need manipulative tricks to have an honest relationship.”
“Do you think marriage is an honest relationship?” Her voice was very soft. There’s a fallacy in argumentation called the fallacy of rhetorical questioning, which is a thinly veiled attempt to make a claim in question form. The implication is that the answer is obvious. “Don’t you think your sainted husband might be just a little sick and tired of all this high-minded respect and understanding? People like to play, Izzie. Maybe he wanted you to dress up in a kimono and have a sword fight with him or something. Didn’t you ever even try to find out? Maybe Karen is trying to help you. Can’t you take it that way?”
I couldn’t. I put most of my worldly goods on the sidewalk and left the country. I had a large red Samsonite suitcase and a fresh tube of toothpaste, the latter of which was confiscated before I was allowed to enter international airspace.
I had failed to maintain the interest of a man who was enthralled by the deeper meaning of Japanese swords and gold lamé bikinis. Next, I failed to shed new light on the metaphysics of a long-dead German genius. But I could keep my cool in the back of a cop car. I could ignore my aching muscles and maintain a graceful pose. Not bad for a fiscal year or two. But it was late April now. The students in the drawing class were working on their final projects, making copies of old masterpieces. It was time for me to put my clothes back on. The ground was heating up, and the days were getting long. The season was starting again.
Part Three
Morphine
In the Feudal Court
A Mutant Cat and Iron Goats
“IT’S A PATCHWORK Mendocino lifestyle,” I acknowledged lightly, hoping I could make “unreliable petty criminal” sound culturally relevant. A bland smile numbed my face as a stunted yellow tabby somersaulted onto my lap. The animal began to writhe in a way that was highly illustrative of why certain job sites are called cathouses. It looked very much like this particular cat was having an erotic interlude; which, if you think about it, didn’t make me much more than a giant feline sex toy. I gave the top of her head a perfunctory pat. I wanted to give the impression that, in addition to overflowing with kindness, I was not the type of person who suspects a housecat of masturbating during a job interview.
I read somewhere that the yellow tabby gene occurs on the male chromosome in cats, so the little creature burrowing into my thighs was probably some kind of bizarre domestic mutant. It could only be an improvement on the basic design of a species that is deceitful, murdering, and extremely unhygienic. I told Fiona Jones I’d come to Mendocino County because I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with the renowned muralist, Alizarin Goldfarb.
“You know,” she replied, drawing it out slowly, like someone producing a weapon for the sole purpose of displaying the aesthetic merits of the blade. “I went to art school. In London.” Her speech was full of faintly foreign idioms, of crisply enunciated t’s and r’s so softly rounded they emerged like well-dressed vowels. “But really, I don’t care at all about art.” Her tone was masterfu
lly inoffensive. She smiled with her mouth closed, squinting into the past. “I only went because, well.” And that “well” had a ripple in it, the kind that implies a sound like gentle laughter, without a trace of mirth. “Because I could. And—” She settled her squint on a poster with several dozen photographs of sheep on it. Each specimen was accompanied by a detailed paragraph about its region of origin and the quality of its wool. “Because, you know,” she went on with a careless confidential something I would not quite describe as amiable; “it was a place where I could be a bit crazy.” It was an unambiguous statement of intent. I hope I never have to come up with a story about why I ignored it.
I had developed a philosophy about job interviews in the back seat of that patrol car. After all, what happened in the shadow of the mountain was a job interview. I was being interviewed for the job of not being in prison. My desire to get that job enhanced my awareness of social cues to the point where distinctions between me and my enemies evaporated. It was a standard mystic revelation, with pragmatic applications.
For example: people talk about applying for a job as a matter of selling yourself, which means you have to win people over. You have to convince them that you are right and others are wrong. But I had learned that I would know exactly what to say, in the moment when everything hung in the balance. I had learned the special knowing that comes with danger, and how to breathe into the pause that invited me to plunge. It was dancing in between the raindrops, a spell that lasts until the sun comes out or the rain comes down. It required perfect concentration, a variety of luck with just a pinch of skill. I may have been a kingpin’s daughter, but that kingpin was a wire-walker, and wire-walkers fall.
That is how I found myself on a narrow dead-end road that ran along the river, in a valley full of coyotes that sang in wild harmony when the night was full of stars. I was there to make sure I never had to talk my way out of a cop car again. If I could do that, I decided, I could talk my way into a job.
Fiona Jones was screening applicants for a caregiver’s position. The client was old and sick and not likely to recover. It was only a long slow dying, not a reckless risk. Optimism can be a very grim thing, when you are abandoning a life of illegal enterprise.
When I pulled into the long, dusty drive, I saw a metal sign on an arch above the entrance. I took it as a signal that I was in the right place. Two rusty iron Billy goats butted horns against opposite ends of a wrought-iron phrase. “Marianas Hof im Tal der Berge,” it announced. German can be so redundant. Where else would a valley be, if not in the mountains? I knew for a fact that I would be the only applicant who could translate that sign. After all, I had crossed the ocean twice to read little yellow books in tiny print with vowels that had dots on top of them. I told Fiona Jones that “Hof” has feudal connotations; that here we were on the estate, or in the court, of Mariana in the valley of the mountains, where I could be useful in more than one tongue.
“I always wondered what that meant,” Fiona murmured. She sounded like a great lady, idly waiting for a peasant lass to bring some lowly needful thing.
Fiona created an air of stillness in a place that was indeed very much like a Hof. The grounds included spacious gardens, several outbuildings, and tenants who generated income from agricultural activities. For many years, however, Mariana’s estate had consisted solely of her bed. She lay there wearing headphones, watching television, and eating very slowly with her hands. If there had once been plate and silver; if her father was a von; it didn’t matter anymore, because Mariana Blanchefleur no longer had the use of them. Her speech was slurred. Her hearing was bad. When I tried to speak German with her, I heard, to my horror, only an infinitive verb at the end of a jumble of sounds.
“Well, if you like her.” She smiled in English at Fiona.
“I think she can hear us,” Fiona replied gravely. “We should wait.”
They didn’t wait long. Fiona called me at Foxglove, where I was paying my rent by digging bull thistles out of the lawn. In inland Mendocino, almost all the pot is grown outdoors, which meant the only thing scarcer than the demand to see me naked was the need for the only well-honed skill I had at the moment.
“Hey. Listen.” She sounded reckless, which, in her nasal English accent, was thrilling and unladylike. It sounded trashy and classy, at the same time. “Do you really get into things. I mean, when you decide to do them do you just say, hey, let’s get this done; and really do it.”
She had Caitlin’s habit of making a question sound like a statement. I began to speak enthusiastically about my great love for gardening and art; but she cut me off.
“Because. Because, if you do, I think we can make this thing work.” She sounded like she was organizing an event where ticket holders could expect some kind of illicit excitement. “But,” she continued, like her principles demanded that she make a full disclosure, “I don’t know what you’ll do all day. When you’re here, I mean. It can get quite boring. I try to interact with her, between about ten and ten-thirty, and then again at three; but there’s quite a bit of, well, waiting. D’you see?” She did not say what she was waiting for.
“I could paint,” I ventured, feeling virtuous and forthright.
Painting, after all, is not like reading a book, which is how I have compensated myself for the majority of brainless jobs I’ve held in the past. You can’t sneak off and while away the badly-paid hours with an easel and a palette and a sloshing jar of solvent and your carefully constructed lighting situation. You can’t just heave it all under the couch, grab a duster, and pretend you’ve been busy all day removing dust motes from a few acres of knick-knacks.
“You’re not allergic to oil paint, are you?” I inquired. That was a good touch, I thought.
“I don’t know,” she said dismissively. Maybe she had been a sculptress, when she went to art school in London. “I have a device,” she murmured. She sounded like she might have been reflecting on whether it was a good idea to tell me that or not. “You just plug it in. It cleans the air.” Her voice quickened a little. “It charges the atmosphere. Like lightning. It really cleans out the negative ions. You’ll see.”
I did not see. Fiona must have thought better of her decision to show me her device, which should have made me nervous but didn’t. What I did find alarming—though I decided to regard it as a test of my courage—was the mass of flesh beneath the pastel comforter. The sheer indifference of this unstoppable human machine as it churned out waste and fragments of thought; as the eyes blinked and the mouth chewed and the hands crawled slowly back and forth across the counterpane: any part of it should have made me run; and not one part of it did.
Mariana Blanchefleur was tremendous. She was imposing. Worst of all, she was completely helpless. She gave the impression, in her hospital bed, of being perched on the crest of a mountain with her hand on the brake, contemplating the scenery below with faded blue eyes. There have been a lot of pale blue eyes in my life, but I have never gotten used to them. They tend to seem a little blank, the tiniest bit fixed, like the intelligence behind them is liable to mania or idiocy or a perception unclouded by the need to understand.
Fiona’s eyes were pale blue, too. I began to realize that her stillness was that of an indrawn breath. She was waiting for the body on the bed to die before she could continue her own life. If I had had the capacity to be nervous about her unseen ion-cleansing machinery, maybe I would have been horrified by the fact that I envied her.
When I was fourteen years old, wearing floral-patterned Spandex leggings like a Russian dowager, I wished more than anything that I had the right to be as miserable as I was. Somehow being fatherless and unattractive, at an age when girls are obliged to be pretty, lacked the dignity of proper misery. I always suspected that I didn’t deserve to feel the way I did, as if unhappiness were a luxury a person had to earn. I was sure some vivid, authentic person was going to find out that whatever I was doing or feeling was not the real version of it. What I wanted, then and now, in Maria
na’s Hof, was to be seared by something real; to serve in a capacity that was beyond the endurance of an ordinary human being.
And so I began a course of instruction on the quantities of shit a human body is capable of generating. We had a form to fill out, regarding the frequency, consistency, color, and amount of a substance that disregarded diapers like a river leaping its banks. The bedding was fouled beyond belief, every single day. The shit coursed into the folds of Mariana’s flesh like something geological, filling in spaces and smoothing terrain.
We had detailed instructions as to allowable quantities of sugar and fluids; which television programs were appropriate; and how long the patient was to lie on which side every morning. I was shocked to see that these instructions were full of grammatical errors; that the patient was to lay on alternating sides for twenty minutes; that she was to have an amount of something clearly numbered; and that errors in parallelism abounded. I suffered from the poorly articulated notion that good grammar signaled organized thought. Fiona’s British accent had seemed to indicate that all suffering would be conducted in well-spoken dignity. It was a hard blow, to find myself elbows deep in shit with someone who had never heard of Schiller.
Still, I descended into the valley of Mariana’s Hof three times a week, for the remainder of spring and into the summer. Mariana continued to eat extremely slowly with her hands; to greet her dentures every morning with a rusty but serviceable, “hello there, teeth”; and, once they were glued to her gums, to grin in an unsmiling way that was far more reassuring than the empty black hole of her undressed mouth.
And then one day, everything changed.
The Train Departs
“MARIANA HAS SHARED something with me,” Fiona reported when I appeared at eight o’clock one Friday evening. “I’ve spoken with her son about it. Also, I spoke with His Holiness.” She gazed off into the near distance of the far wall. She was poised and inscrutable.