Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  Nell looks much like her sister, and what is more wounding to me, she smells like Marie, if such a family likeness is possible. She is the ground— the earth that supports—beneath the radiant sky that had been Marie. Nell’s eyes are blue, the near opposite of the warm brown of Marie’s eyes, yet just as deep and arresting. I place the hand I abraded on cinder block over the hand she has placed on my shoulder, and see under the sleeve of her blouse the raised, worm-coloured scars along her forearm that are there, or that will be there one day. Where Marie has used a needle, Nell has used, or will use, the teeth of a broken bottle.

  “Marie said she wanted you here. For this.” She swallows after speaking the last two words, as if to take them back.

  “I had to come, and I wanted to.”

  “Could you . . . could I ask you to come with me?” She takes my chafed hand and leads me past the deep forests Marie had painted half from the banks of brush and trees in Golden Gate Park and half from her imagination, past the seascapes Marie had done of an ocean she had never seen but had read about, past the small cottage in Berkeley she had painted that she had transplanted to a hillock like one in a work by Cezanne. Nell walks ahead of me with near-unreal gracefulness that shames me in a way that I cannot name. There is a memory that stirs warmly inside me, and I realize that Nell leads me the way Marie led me to the corner of that freezing bar in January.

  Nell stops us before the far wall of the space, near windows that look out on the Bay.

  “Can you tell me who they are?” she asks, gesturing to Marie’s portraits.

  Empathy is what scholars say is the investment of oneself into a painting. It is an incomplete notion, for a painting can intrude upon you and your perceptions. Looking at the canvas that Marie painted, looking at how Marie had forced her own compassionate and loving sight to stay within the textures and strokes she crafted, I felt all that is, that was, that had been, Janet intrude upon me. Marie had painted Janet reading a book in the Park. The curling flames of Janet’s rich, thick hair were draped over one hand. So perfect were the textures, one could see the motion of Janet’s fingers twisting a lock as she read.

  “Do you know her?” asks Nell.

  “It’s . . . she’s . . . Janet. Marie and I knew her years ago. She disappeared.” I stumble for the words. “Could you ask the curator, or whoever is handling the sales, to not put this one in the catalogue? Or online? And maybe leave the work untitled?”

  “Marie arranged for all that weeks ago,” says Nell. Her words are clipped, not out of anger at my request, but out of discomfort for speaking of Marie in the so recent past.

  “Of course she did, of course she would,” I say. Or think I say.

  So frightened, so sleep-deprived had Janet been before she fled town and her stalking ex-husband, Marie and I had heard her scream when a lock of her hair, flowing around her like red-brown smoke, had been caught in a low-hanging branch one windy day.

  “Marie said that she . . . Janet, you said? That she probably wanted to stay disappeared.”

  Nell next walks me to a portrait of Tom, whom Marie had painted in warm earth-tones. In his portrait, Tom smokes while hunched over his coffee. Marie had caught the happy semi-grin that Tom wore whenever he lit up, knowing that he had successfully displaced his need for coke to the less lethal need for cigarettes and caffeine. Tom had disappeared as well, either to leave the city and its temptations or to be consumed by those temptations elsewhere, with no witnesses to his defeat by that which steady smoking and coffee had held at bay.

  “‘Tom,’” says Nell after I have named him. “I met him, I think. I just couldn’t remember his name.”

  We next stand before a portrait of Paul, whom Marie and I had met while he wore a cast, as he was recovering from the spite of a girlfriend who had smashed a jar of pennies onto his hand. Marie had painted Paul with his guitar on his lap—his face set as he worked the hand-exerciser that might one day give him back his music. The play of light on Paul’s face is like that of a Hopper; the look in his eyes is one of pain and hope.

  I tell Nell Paul’s name and his story, though I do not know if he has ever learned to play again.

  I feel my pulse throb in my neck as I speak to Nell, as I realize that Marie’s art has become more beautiful with her death. While she lived, it was timid of her light, even though what makes it beautiful is the investment of her light.

  Nell thanks me by offering me a plastic cup of jug wine from the crumb-ridden caterer’s table. I decline, and she seems to nod, as if remembering. By the table, on a small podium, is a photo album of Marie’s unfinished works. The cityscape view out of Marie’s living room window floats like some half-realized dream in the album behind a clear plastic sheet protector. The album feels as if something close to me might sleep among Marie’s other half-finished dreams and visions. If it is the face of another dead or lost friend, I can’t bear to look at it.

  Nell’s glance falls to the album, to the cityscape that had filled the window beneath which Marie had died.

  “Do you still have a key to Marie’s place?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, giving Nell insight into my relationship with Marie of which she may not have been aware.

  Nell looks down to the scavenged table, as if embarrassed by the question and my answer. She reaches for her purse and opens it.

  They are coming. I feel them. Their approach is like the spread of wasp venom under newly stung skin. They have known my destination. They approach en masse, to reattempt the ambush they had intended for the bus stop. Because of their numbers, they feel close. Closer even than does Nell standing before me. I should flee to the anonymity of my apartment, to the safety of its smallness and the invisibility of its single window that faces a brick wall.

  Yet there is a safety in this moment that I feel, as Nell reaches into her purse and pulls forth a key ring. They will not come, I know, until this safe moment is over. Nell removes a key from where it dangles next to a shiny, newly-cut one just like it and hands it to me. I feel the residue on it of the grief and the anger she felt when the clerk at the coroner’s office handed it to her. The key scalds my hand, and I feel as if my palm might blister where she has placed it.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” says Nell. “Can you meet me at Marie’s sometime after ten? There are things . . .” her throat constricts, as does mine while I meet her eyes. “There are things Marie said she wanted you to have if anything happened to her.”

  Nell is furious; there is terrible beauty to rage on the face of one as graceful as she, even when such rage is hidden. Loss masks itself beneath her skin. She wishes to make her rage known, rage born of the sight of Marie’s face, haloed by the glow of a metal slab, the face I had seen moving with the simulacra of life when Marie and I had spoken our maimed farewell.

  “I can meet you there. After ten,” I say, putting the key in my pocket.

  “I have to play hostess. Please excuse me.”

  She gives me her hand, now slick with cold sweat. I have upset her, or she has upset herself. This moment and its safety dissolve around us. “Thank you for coming,” she says.

  I leave the showing. I walk past the colors and the palettes I recognize from the flecks on Marie’s nails, from the smears on the overalls she wore while working, from the reeking drop-cloths that she piled in the corner of her kitchen. I take the back stairwell where the caterers loiter, feeling them come closer. At street level, I see them coming—a few cluster near rusted cars and vans parked in the Waterfront lot.

  They will position themselves throughout the neighbourhood. They will hunt me in bars and coffee shops, and coordinate themselves through their cell phones and voicemails and text messages. I do not fathom this breaking of their theatre of stealth, and though I know going to Marie’s home will savage my heart, I am thankful to have a place to go besides my home, which will be watched closely tonight.

  Nell waits in the hallway outside Marie’s apartm
ent, tapping cigarette ash into a beer can. The sleeves of her blouse are rolled up, revealing smooth skin etched with as-yet-unbroken blue veins.

  She smiles as I walk up the hallway, as I smile politely and smother down my horror at what she will do.

  She drops her cigarette hissing into the can. She stands and again fixes me with her blue eyes. I hide what I see of her future, what I see of her choices and how they will write themselves deeply in her flesh. For the second time tonight, she says, “I’m glad you came.”

  There is no graceful reply to what she has said, so I say next to nothing: “Have you been here long?”

  “About an hour. I couldn’t stand being at the showing after a while. A lot of the so-called patrons were just vultures.”

  I smell them on her as she says “vultures.” They have been close to her, soiling the space of Marie’s art, her empathy, and her mourning.

  “Is there anything I can do? To help settle . . . things?”

  “No. Not now. I just want you to have what Marie wanted you to have. I need to see something done. I want to have some closure, tonight.”

  She opens the door and the residual smells of Marie—the lingering scent of the expensive lotion she always used out of vanity for her skin, and also the scent of the sandalwood conditioner she said always made her feel calm—choke me with memory.

  We enter. On the couch before us is an amorphous mass, the color and texture of which is immediate in the tactile memory of my hands.

  “I couldn’t figure out why she wanted you to have this ratty thing,” Nell says, picking up her grandmother’s fur coat. Trying a feeble joke, she says, “You’re not going to wear it, are you?”

  “No,” I say, and the word is more coughed than spoken. I can’t bear the thought of touching the coat, even as Nell holds it out to me. Nell, with her otherworldly grace, steps toward me and I nearly step back. She hands it to me and I feel I could tear it as if it were paper. The sensation, the remembered feeling of holding Marie’s hand under the silk lining, trembles in my blood.

  “We . . . had . . . with the coat . . .” Nell eyes never leave mine. I see in her the frailty behind her strength that will lead her to run broken glass along her wrist. I want to reach through the time separating us from that moment and snatch away the bottle before it can rip her.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she says, and takes back the coat. She rests it on the chair that Marie and I had salvaged when the college kids down the street had moved and had dumped it on the curbside. Nell walks to the battered desk where Marie’s ancient and paint-smeared laptop sits. Nell picks up a stack of disks and hands them to me. Some bear multicoloured thumb and fingerprints in oil-based paint.

  “Marie didn’t want you to know how she worked. She was almost kind of . . . superstitious about it. She said you always figured things out with just a few hints. She called you ‘Sherlock’, sometimes. As a joke. Behind your back. She didn’t want you to know that she took digital snaps of people when they weren’t looking. She hated doing portraits from sittings. She didn’t want you to know, because then you’d be self-conscious around her and her portrait of you would come out wrong.”

  I hold the disks as if fanning cards. Nell says, “These are the shots she took of everyone she did portraits of. I think they’re all your friends. And hers. She said you had a real big heart. That you’re sentimental. I think she wanted to print them out for you, but she never got around to it.” Nell shrugs. “I’d do it, but I don’t know how to work her printer, and I can’t find the manual to save my life.”

  “I don’t own a computer,” I blurt, looking at the discs. More in control, I say, “But I can take them to a print shop, I think.” I run my thumb along the oil-based mark of Marie’s thumb on a disc of bright orange, remembering the feel of the flecks she preserved on her nails.

  “Marie said you were a real technophobe,” she says with a half-smile.

  “There’s another thing. I don’t know if you’ll want it. She never really said that she wanted you to have it, but I think you should at least see it.” Nell leads me to the gutted walk-in closet that is—that had been—Marie’s studio. We tip the electric fans in the doorway that had been her ventilation system to one side. A person awaits me in there. I feel his presence, almost in the way I feel the presence in this city of the one relation in this world that is of me, yet not truly of my blood . . . despite the blood we shared.

  On the easel Marie’s uncle had made from scrap wood is an unfinished canvas, a photo of which must have called to me from the album of incomplete works at the showing. The face of the man in the half-done portrait is the face I have not seen for days in the mirror. I recognize myself in the way that I had recognized Janet and Tom and Paul, refracted through Marie’s eyes, illuminated by her light.

  “She couldn’t finish it,” says Nell. “She kept trying to catch you in just the right moment, to take a digital snap that’d be just right. She took a lot of snaps of you while you weren’t looking. She said it was easy, because you were always distracted. But she could never find a way to complete you. Do you want it? The art dealer wasn’t sure he could sell it, because it’s the only unfinished portrait. Will you take it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I lean out the closet doorway, almost knocking over one of the fans. I grip the glass doorknob; it creaks. I let go, and am next aware that Nell’s hands are strong. They are like the hands of a nurse used to heaving the sick and the dying from bed to gurney. Her strong hands lift me to my feet and guide me to the sofa. Discreetly, she leaves me to sob there, laid out as I sense that she has repeatedly sobbed in the same spot while she deals with her sister’s unfinished affairs . . . her unfinished life.

  After a period of time I can’t measure, after I have sat up, she walks to the sofa and says, “It’s okay.” She gestures to her own dry eyes, “I have nothing left. If you can still cry, I kind of envy it. If you still got grief to let go, let it go.” She pulls matches from her purse set on the floor by the sofa and lights a candle that rests in a holder by Marie’s laptop. “It’s okay,” she says, then shuts off the lights, leaving me in dim comfort. After a moment, I hear the refrigerator door opening and the cracking of a beer can in the kitchen. Nell returns, holding the can in one hand and a bottle of non-alcoholic beer in the other. “You don’t drink, right?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, as I sit up a little straighter.

  With her strong hands, she twists off the bottle cap, which seems to fly off. There’s hardly any sound as the cap is released, so fast does she remove it. I take the beer and sip. It’s flat, but very cold. I only realize it is flat as I take a second sip. I look to the amber glow of the candle. I drink again, and I know. I know that this is the candle Marie used to melt the smack that killed her. Time slows, and I feel what I at first think is the ghost of the numbness Marie felt as she began to die. In the flame, in the flow of wax, I see who sold her the smack and why, and I realize I am partly culpable in her murder, that I led her killers to her. I realize, without the use of my sight, that they who have tampered with what Marie pushed into her veins have tampered with what I have taken past my lips. I look to Nell and stand. I won’t make it to the door. Dumbly, moving like the drunk I once was, I turn to the window, the very window that Marie looked out to greet her sister below, the very window from which I had seen Marie’s light shine forth. I see in reality the unfinished cityscape Marie had painted, thinking I might open the window and cry out to someone who might care.

  In the dim-lit glass, my reflection changes. The smooth expanse that has covered my face fades and my features return to my sight for the first time in days. In my sight, I have disfigured myself in the mirror before, knowing of ugliness in my future I could not bear to see. Yet the new, smooth and featureless face, that I now realize was not new at all, was no mere self-disfigurement, but portent . . . inevitability. A future I no longer see, because it is a future that is now arriving.
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br />   I turn back to Nell and speak meaningless syllables as the doped beer she has been given to offer me falls to the floor on which Marie died. My sight fades and returns. Nell stands in the doorway, cradling the phone in her hand. As I black out, I see that they, in their past and present split selves, will soon come through the door to claim their prize.

  The fur coat is on me, draped like a quilt. Nell does not know that the people she helps, the people who have hunted me, have killed her sister with uncut dope . . . much stronger than anything Marie, or any user in this city, could withstand.

  The place I’ve been taken to, the place I have been returned to across the gulf of my life, reeks of stale curry and incense. My life away from this spot, to them, has been mere caesura. The caesura now ends. I am on the floor. Nell holds my cinder block-skinned hand under the coat and through the reek of the place, I smell that she has anointed herself with the lotion and the conditioner her sister had used. Against my will, the sensation of the coat and the scents that Nell wears summon the memory of Marie that is more than memory, that I realize has been haunting me with greater force than any mere memory possibly could. They mill about, their grotesque treads making the floorboards creak as they light candles around the room.

  What Nell had been given to slip me in the beer still addles my brain, though not nearly as much as does the sudden full and terrible restoration of my sight. So blind I have been, I did not know that I was blinded. I could not see my own future. I could not see this trap, because the mere envisioning of it in a future relative to the present I have just quit had snuffed my sight to the future I could have otherwise seen. Inevitability . . . the lesson of the Scottish king.