She floats down off the table, dizzy, having to visit the water closet for half an hour. She lands a little too heavily. The tall flea shop vase tilts off the mantel. She and Ted cherished that ornament. It was such a hybrid with its narrow Asian neck and its spacious Greek hips. Like a concubine, Ted mused, who had become a mother. She has chipped its body along the torso. The gray enamel shows through. She puts it back up on the mantel, turning the damaged patch to the wall.
There’s a fainthearted bulb in the loo with a dangling kite string that clicks the room half awake when you give it a tug. But she doesn’t bother with it at this hour. She scratches at the abrasive hide of her wooden Salisbury Fair matchbox. She lights the three phallic lavender candles with her hand shaking and the wineskin of her bladder bloated and burning. The flavor of the candles matches that of her bath soap, bringing a tonality to the odor in the room. This is most comforting on those rare occasions when she staggers into the bath in the earliest hours and the perfume reminds her that there is a warm bed and perhaps the remnants of ambrosial dreams waiting for her one room away. She hikes her skirt. She sits and shivers, and she hears the sound of her body making a horse’s hiss against the bowl. Ted had hung atrophied willows, torn from the bough, larval with burrs, upside down on the wall. He wanted something of the fecundity of the woods to rub off on his overtrumped mind when he took it to the toilet. Sylvia allowed the willow whips to remain following his departure. She remembered their appearance in the solemnities of the Marquis de Sade, and she recognized the irony, in spite of herself, in the reference to self-mortification. She dabs at her vagina with a swath of tissue. A memento of blood comes away on the tissue, red-black in the candlelight, arterial, raw-blooded, the color of her poetry. She stands up with an urge to rouge her lips.
The makeup kit, there on the bureau with the lamina of dust over the coat of arms, is left over from her Mademoiselle magazine junket to New York City ten years ago. She can see the tracing of her own fingers in the settled white ash. She had won their annual short-story contest. They flew her in, put her up, decked her out, took her out, and snapped pictures of her for an upcoming issue. When she returned home, she was able to place poems in highbrow reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. An old friend of her mother’s worked as a file clerk for the Boston Globe. The New England paper of record had paid Sylvia the hush-hush compliment of preparing her obituary. They were holding it in their reserve morgue, as they did for only the brightest of the local up-and-comers. Soon afterward she had another breakdown.
The refillable lipstick tube that came with the kit is as phallic as her lavender candles. It is stenciled with a French name that figured in the Hundred Years’ War. She puts the tube to her lips. The cold, soft tongue licks her bloody.
12.
Ted
The white scarf dangles to Assia’s feet and evidences an unaccountable breeze in the room. She lets it go, and it ebbs into a floret upon the hardwood. It crosses Ted’s mind that the ceremony of the striptease could be an appropriate element, incorporated without antipathy, into the standard funerary rites. Down the hall in the Kingdom of the Sun, there are thirty-six exposures, across the expanse of one entire Serravezza marble wall, of a ninth-century B.C. Nile queen slowly and minutely, and with no sacrifice of mystery, being divested of her second set of skin.
Assia sits down beside the unruly pond of her scarf and turns away from Ted, as he longs for her to do. He loves having her from the back with the reef of her spinal column appearing and disappearing like a dancer behind a scrim. The huntsman in him longs to strip her of even her skin, slowly, minutely, the exposure of her viscera ultimately a vision of triumph, an ennobling mirror. She unsnaps the locket clamp of her purse. She takes out a tube of hand cream. A medallion of the hexagram of David. Her brass-and-flint lighter. Her blue packet of Gitanes. She kisses at the wick of her cigarette. The blade of smoke curls into her dark locks. She snaps the back clasp of her brassiere, the same gesture, more or less, as in igniting her lighter. The straps slide down her shoulders, exposing the smooth, supple marble of her bare back. Ted stirs toward her on the balls of his hands and feet. He licks at the slender column of her neck, tasting fragrance and the mist of the salt sea. She shudders.
When he opens his eyes, she is arching over the minor embarrassment of his belly. Backward with her face turned away, the smoke of her cigarette funnelform, her hair whipping like a mare’s. He can’t help it; he is inclined to think that her sexual imagination might be informed by the butchery that she witnessed during her term of service with the Israeli nursing corps. She went where others, including Sylvia—vestal, yes, but no vestal virgin—would never have thought to go. “B-a-a-a-h,” she brays at him now like a nanny goat, mocking his country origins and his probable maiden experiences with coitus. She digs her Magen David medallion into his thigh so that she will still be able to claim proprietary rights an hour or so after the fact. Not even the mucilage of the act will be free of her acquisitiveness. She will collect it in the rumple of her filigreed handkerchief and open the cloth only on her washing Sunday. She will hold it to the sunlight over the gurgling cropper in the yard in Devon and cheer herself with the sight of its butterfly.
The rent in her buttocks is an abyss, a wound. It is the gap that allows in the ray of enlightenment. He reaches and makes a bridle out of a plait of her hair. Her head snaps back. She bores into the skin of his scrotum with the needle of her fingernail. Like penitents, their wounds will evidence their devotion. Ted turns his head to cool his cheek against the chill floor. There are painted kraters on all sides of him. The Athenians exported their oil, mixed their wine, and interred the ashes of their honored dead in these urns. The majesty of the kraters points up not only the Greeks’ elegiac obsession with the leave-taking of death, but also their awestruck veneration of the hallowed coffers of both the human mind and the human womb, in all their diverse potentialities. Both of these the Greeks deified. Sun and moon.
Ted likes to run his eyes swiftly past the vases’ pictograms and read them as they run together, almost like a child’s flipbook show. Chariot caravans orbit the bellies of the urns.
There are rows of display cases, abutting the far wall. In one of them is the floating bust of a female. Ted has seen any number of these veiled busts, but this one he cannot remember for all the thousands of times he has been in this gallery. He thinks it particularly odd that the features are not those of a woman, but rather those of a child. There were no dead children in the ancient world, when you came down to it. An infanticide victim, at the point of death, was considered senior to the most venerable old man. Death simply knew no youth.
Ted feels Assia shifting her weight. His wet prick sizzles in the chill air. She turns her body and bristles her fingernails deep in the black wool of his chest. Why has she stopped?
“Ted,” she says, her voice not raised but booming from deep in the orotund trench of her lungs (the charm of it is that her voice always seems portentous even when uttering trifles), “I think that I’m pregnant.”
13.
Sylvia
There was another contest prior to the Mademoiselle one. She considers herself the winner of that one as well. Or at least the survivor. She is thinking of her first electroshock experience.
They culled her hair. She thought that the braids they shaped looked like conductive cables in the mirror. They shaved her at the temples. The nurse was direct from Cocteau casting, hunched and horse-faced. She prepped Sylvia with comb and razor to play the role of the heretic. She remembers those vaguely ammoniac sponge baths in the days prior to the treatment. Her skin smelled like rancid wine, and her body hair had come off in the vinegar scrubbings as though it deigned to play no role in the award ceremony. Mother suddenly found sentiment. In the preceding weeks, she had always emphasized just how unsorry she felt for Sylvia, and how unwilling she was to take responsibility for the consequences of her behavior. But all through the ordeal, Mother lit up her blue prayers to that other
virgin, by default Sylvia’s matron saint, in the temple across the street that remained open all hours to accommodate the overflow of the contaminated sane, the stricken families of the mental patients. She remembers Mother coming and going without reason from the room, but always bringing in another cast-off sun flare, as though she would amass a wreath. There was a graveyard behind the temple that she liked to go walking in, to calm herself. Leaving her daughter at night, she would say not goodbye but get well. Then, as now, sickness qualified as grounds for sanctification, but also for abandonment. The shrine, as she learned in that hospital, is a thousand times more lonely and claustrophobic than the grave could ever be.
The fleshless meat loaf that looked and tasted like a gravied-over seraph’s tongue. The sponge of airy custard in a puddle of brûlée for dessert. The meal cart on casters. The lowered voices. The soft-soled shoes. The latex hands, milky to the elbows. The television in the hall with the gray theater and vaudeville high jinks on tap through the evenings. The evenings. The bluntness of the evenings when the back rubs, the magazines, and the sweet tea, three times a day after each round of medication, melted together on the palate like an all-day lozenge with a sour center that tasted ultimately like a rusted link in a chain. So that you went to bed tasting your own servility. Inasmuch as your mind was in disrepair, your mind and your will no longer belonged to you. Your individuality was in the shop. The doctors would repair it by jump-starting it via the current of theirs. You would be just like everyone else by the time you were ready to go home.
The horse-faced nurse washed Sylvia’s face. Not only did she wash her face, but she let the medicinal cold cream seep and burn and fissure like plaster, so that it had to be removed with witch hazel and a putty knife. “Mr. DeMille,” she said in her half dream and into the coned light, “I am ready for my close-up.” The doctors came in and got their black Vulgate manual out of the desk drawer; the plastic-coated pages sealed with humidity like a volume in the library of a cuisinier. This was a dress rehearsal, she thought, fidgeting in her restraints. They rolled their thunder altar out of the closet. It was domed with a plastic bubble top, sled-shaped, transparent, and fogged over, formfitting the dials. They painted her temples with a tart glue and gave her a Cherokee headdress of metal to wear. The horse-face mouthed “Open wide” like an orthodontist. She fit a bridle between Sylvia’s teeth.
A blue volt hung in the air, memorized her image, singed her hair, and left burning Veronicas on either of her retinas. The room was dipped in viscous silver, and she surged, slow-mo, with an equine heart and a prophet’s rapture at having leaped the first hurdle, the electric arc of the archangel. And having visualized, at last, the voice of her father in that flash of blue chloride.
Sylvia went back into the front room, pouting out her carnal mouth. The rouge had not yielded the oral fix that she had been longing for. The thought of a cigarette still held a singular appeal. Maybe the old pensioner, who lived alone in the cellar and did not like crying infants, or the rumble of their perambulator on the landing, would have a pack. He smelled of numerous bad habits, one in particular that he seemed to share with her babies. The cold fretful notebook lay there, guarded by her father’s stone totem. In a feathery hand, the opened page read:
Time eternal
Tunnel
Arterial underground railroad
The abortive verse sounded, in the bowl of her mind, like a bad jump-rope carol. She picked up the pen and bit into the tip of it. Her girl had two breaking teeth that nettled her nipples. Why didn’t the sexes share the sacrifice of children more equitably? Otto rested in peace through her breakdowns, her suicide attempts, her shock therapy, and her marital emergencies. Poor Mother scurried in and out of the Room of Revelation, across state lines, and over the Atlantic Ocean. Daddy was the dozy drone, and Mother was the queen bee who would milk the flower. Sylvia would keep her tormented nipples if Ted would consent to wear the intricate, self-willed cosmos of her uterus for a while. Let him try to go a-whoring with a fallopian underground railroad.
Jesus, that’s it.
She scratched out the previous curtain-raiser in order to give herself a fresh running start. She sailed from the blocks.
Time eternal
Tunnel
Fallopian underground railroad
Hot water clock
Dickory,
Dickory
Blue prayer
Hardware
Sun flare
Un
Nun
Done.
Run.
Run.
Herr DeMille in a miner’s hat
Bulb to his brain
He has the light
I am the camera
The cord is the outlet.
Auteur,
Auteur
Vater,
Vater
Not a drop to drink.
Will you burn the stigmata
From the rose?
The burning thirst
Of your hypodermic nose.
Where I go, you grow.
Oh, Daddy, press that block
Press that block back in the book.
It fell off in the dark
With the club of your foot.
Herr Loom.
I, the bride
Daddy, the groom
We had our ceremony
In the thunder room.
We will have another soon.
14.
Ted
Ted and Assia are walking back through the galleries in their bare feet now, gathering their clothes. Ted is thinking of the unfortunate fortune of being here in this forbidden showroom, the entrance having proven smooth sailing and the terminus affording no easy way out. It was like writing poetry.
Here is their chaperone, their recording angel and guardian sandman, asleep in a schoolboy’s hard-backed chair. Assia mimes the guard a good-night kiss as she passes. Speaking of unfortunate fortune, what of the poet’s jinx in only being able to find lucidity in mystery? This news of a contraband pregnancy juxtaposed with a nursling’s bust that, by some trick of kismet, happens to wear a cowl of telepathy over its face. How intriguing this would all seem if it were happening to someone else.
Britain is a narrow-minded country, always has been. But status in the sacred poet’s circle traditionally allows and affords pretty much anything. Except for the lack of quiddity. You could get dropped from catalogs and kicked out of gentlemen’s clubs for that. That is if you do not happen to be W. H. Auden. Look at the tripe that he is getting away with these days, getting gold medals, lucrative contracts, writer-in-residence arrangements, and, most incredibly, getting himself laid over. When Auden hiccups his adulators bend and grab their ankles, and the lit critics back off warily because, deep in the gray areas of their hearts, they hazard a guess that they might be subject to the very same laws of gravity as old Wynnie. The British intelligentsia tell themselves that an artist of Auden’s stripe is best measured by how far he has fallen and that according to this logic, Auden has reached his inverted apex, and we should all count ourselves fortunate to have the opportunity to look down upon a great man. His face gets more wrinkled and simian, his cough sounds of a deeper spectrum of gravel, his verses grow more errant and boozy, and his friends at the reviews get a case of cold compassion.
Forget Auden; you name it, we’ve got it. Drug addiction, boozing, brawling, womanizing, police records going back to adolescence, slabbering, incontinence, Marxist affiliations, goddess worship, loud neckties, bad breath, and mad wives. No sense in killing the messenger when the messenger labors to do the job for you. Homosexuality would not be tolerated in the collegiate and broad-minded corridors of Parliament, where, if you want the truth, they’ve gotten away with well-paid indolence for going on two decades now, or at the corner grocer’s for that matter, but among interior decorators and reputable poets, it is positively comme il faut.
Wife abandonment, as near as he can tell, should register as no big deal for a climber like
Ted. His file had MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES stamped upon it from the beginning. What with the way that Sylvia came off at Cambridge alum and publishing gatherings with her American “spontaneity,” as she called wearing her obvious insecurity on her sleeve, stepping on sensibilities all across the room, even new friends who knew him solely in print, and had just shaken hands with him for the first time, took him aside to whisper their reservations. They pleaded with him not to take their dislike of his wife personally. She would be such a blight on his career. The rejection and the hurt feelings only set Sylvia higher upon her high horse. She rode like a raja.
And she talked, dear girl, of becoming an equestrienne, fancying as she did the boots, the whip, and the breeches. Only last fall, she would go down to the market almost every day and let that Burmese-looking crone with the clay siphon in her mouth mind the babies in their carriage, while Mother went ’round in a circle on that toothless gluepot that the Tinkers called Ariel, tethered to a pole all the while.
Pale horse, pale rider.
There’s an archway off to the right with a bronze seraph blowing into the thunderstick of a bassoon, sounding holy hell from the looks of him. Ted steps under the arch, and Assia, though she is a step ahead with her back turned, veers with him, missing not a beat, navigating on the radar of their mutual enchantment that even an unplanned blessed event cannot jam. The high ceilings and the Ionian pilasters are left behind in favor of the cramped, windowless, and rusticated rooms of the musical instruments collection. There’s a wooden stairway three quandaries ahead, leading down to the rear exit, where they will encounter a second somnambulant guard who will rouse himself and toot his whistle as they try to soft-shoe by him. Several more guardians will materialize and take turns lecturing Ted on the sanctity of public art and municipal buildings, and two or three of them will mention that when they were his age, they were knee-deep in the limestone pit, a dozen hours a day, clearing rock and rubble so that kids like him could grow up in a decent domicile. And what’s a strapping young bloke like him doing for his daily, anyway? Not on the public pap, are ya?
Little Fugue Page 7