Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  He could sip his drink from her favorite silver Ecco pump and observe the formalities of the New Year, out with the old and all that. He seemed so stupefied the last time that she looked in on him that he would likely go through with it, drinking from the bateau of her shoe like a camel at the trough, but perhaps she’d better not chance that just now. There’s already been one casualty today. How heartless that sounds in her head. Well, it’s a wake, isn’t it, even if she is the only one who seems to know it? Here in an upper compartment of the cupboard—how like Sylvia to hoard her treasures—is a shallow vase unsuitable for anything more than a spray of geraniums. Its base is constructed of copper and rock crystal, molded into the star motif of a reliquary. With a little imagination, it should serve as a kingly vessel from which to imbibe, and the revelers should be able to recognize that Ted, foremost among them, is the one who deserves a stiff drink in a royal chalice. He’s the one who has been crowned today. She gives the relic a soapy rinse under the tap and it heartens up perceptibly. She has another look through the liquor bottles. The wine jugs all bear fraudulent Italian surnames. They rightfully hail from the rusting nether rimples of the Iron Curtain. The Baltics hemorrhaged Jews following the war. Beyond that, she knows almost nothing about those godforsaken states. They cling to their sector upon the map but haven’t put up anything of a struggle for a world identity in the longest time. It makes sense that they’re making wine, bottling up Lethe for want of tears. And what with their own slippery economy and unrealized national expectations, the Brit import/export fellows, the new advance men of the dying empire, have hastily learned how to turn a dexterous buck, cousining up with their red bedfellows, laughing all the way to the customhouse and back. The berries are, beyond question, grown in cork-lined uranium hothouses, harvested, and shipped immediately down the hall into the infrared vat rooms wherein they are stirred with enzymes, and then galloned for consumption. This woebegone wine should be something of an applicable elixir to toast Sylvia with, and, apropos, she did witness a round of salutations to the absent hostess as she lingered in the front room a little while ago. She didn’t want to risk greeting people for fear that she would come off as being territorial so soon after the tragic event. The ladies of the gathering had kind of crowded her out of the nursery earlier, although she is carrying those children’s half sibling, and that would tend to make her their maternal next of kin. She did happen to notice that the partygoers in the front room who raised a jelly glass to Sylvia did so in a deadpan, almost derisive manner, much in the same way that she has grown used to hearing these English people express the tepid wish that their queen be saved. Assia thinks, nay, she knows, that the guests are out there talking about her. She’s allowing them the opportunity to let the whispering campaign seep from their systems. She’ll make a grand reentrance, drink held high in her hand. She’ll squeeze in next to Ted on the couch, and she’ll sit there, and she will share in his silence.

  Here’s gin. Ted’s a whiskey man. Tough luck for him. He goes for blondes as well. At least, he’s no liar. Ted told her Sylvia tried peroxide, a few months ago, as a means of reconciliation. She told her husband, in an appeasing moment over the telephone, that the sizzling in her roots was a kind of castigation for her temper tantrums. This morning, they found her with her head in the oven.

  The gin will have to do. Ted’s too pitiable to be left too long alone out there. He doesn’t only go for random blondes; he goes after colleagues’ wives, Assia could tell you firsthand. She’s got to get this drink together. She shaves a bit of ice from the block. Someone’s gone by the fishmonger’s. According to the man’s account, ice was the one item to be had and at no premium, at that. The man brought in the ice in a Styrofoam crate. “You have liquor, haven’t ya?” he asked her, his face a little trout-like. She scoops the slivered ice into the little crystal-and-copper vase. She drizzles in a little tap water. The gin foams like addled ammonia. She blows on it. It begins to subside.

  The children are crying, refusing to nap. They don’t cry with rage, but with incredulity. At the clamor in the front room. At the truancy of their mother. The two of them were in police custody until a couple of hours ago, charged with the sins of the father. It was Abdiel who went and got them, after Ted phoned him at Cambridge and her at work. They cried all the way home and didn’t stop until Assia had a chance to hold them. Then these people started to show up.

  The living room is crowded. “Excuse me,” she keeps having to say, stepping into the spaces between carpet sitters’ legs, making her way toward the couch.

  “What’s happened to your hand, dear?” someone asks, seeing the white bandage.

  “It was only an accident,” she answers.

  Someone asks where the bathroom is. She turns. The person who has asked has not asked Assia. Someone else gives accurate directions. Another, seeing Assia’s momentary confusion, reaches and brushes back the hair from her eyes with a look that shares a fraudulent complicity. Why is it that death brings people together and renders them greater strangers? She turns back toward where Ted is sitting. A slender lady with a Madame Pompadour hairstyle attempts to take the glass out of her hand. “You’ll need your wits about you,” Lady Pompadour says.

  Both of their hands are now on the glass. Assia holds tight. “It’s for Ted,” she says. The lady lets go. Assia keeps moving. People are ramped all the way down the stairwell. The front door must be open. She feels the chill running up her legs. It’s starting to get loud in here. What if the neighbors phone the police? Would it rouse Ted from his stupor? Would he stand there with his shoulders outdistancing the space between the door frame and would he ask the constables if they have no respect for the dead, coming around at a time like this?

  Now she bends to hand Ted the glass. She looks into his eyes. She’s worked as a war nurse. She knows that you’d have to do a little better than remorse alone to put such a patina of absolute polestar distance into the human iris. He has taken some kind of medication. She can feel a cold trickle of adrenaline leaking into the pit of her stomach. Has Ted suddenly recalled his marriage vows, irrespective of coda concerning the death that shall do them part? Is he chasing her grave before it is even dug?

  “Is there a doctor here?” she hears herself asking.

  Someone places their hand in the small of her back. Ted is reaching for the drink in the monarch’s chalice. If he downs it, it will be the nails in the coffin and hers shall be the hand holding the hammer. “Are you unwell?” the person touching her asks. She moves the drink out of Ted’s range. She slips her fingers around his thick wrist, feeling for his pulse. The flesh is warm to the touch, and the pulse seems regular enough. His hands seem horribly enlarged. People without medical experience have no idea of the human extremities’ propensity for swelling. Assia leans forward and locks her eyes into his. Ted’s eyes are damp not with tears, but with a viscid layer of insulating mucus. The two of them are leagues apart now. The shock has turned him, a natural field soldier, into an aviator. She can feel the wind, the centrifugal zephyr, from the windmill of his withdrawal. She holds her ground, holding out for a spark of recognition to make itself apparent in his eyes. She glimpses her own eyes in the aphasic glass of his pupils; intensely green, helplessly floating, a true portrait of her own most hated persona, that of the defenseless onlooker. She sees herself look away.

  Abdiel is sitting too close to Ted on the sofa. The bloodied tassel of his fez is hanging down directly between his dark eyes. “Has he taken something?” she whispers to Abdiel.

  “In the gut and on the chin,” he whispers back. Abdiel is a journal editor and a very poor poet.

  Ted reaches and takes the drink out of Assia’s hand. One of the hands wears a bloodied compress that matches hers.

  “Would you shut the door down there, please?” someone hollers down the stairs.

  Why did she pick a poet? Another poet. Her husband David is a poet. In the Holy Land during the war, everyone wrote verses. Commonly one began with furti
ve journal entries. Grinding fatigue caused language itself to falter. Also, what began as something in the way of a keepsake very soon began to seem like a last will and testament without beneficiaries. Poems became epistles to no one. Her journal dissolved into multilingual delirium. She slept, when she slept, in a common dormitory with one meagerly stocked iron stretcher serving as the camp library. Insomnia was one of the latter-stage symptoms. Anesthetics were no longer available to the unwounded. She would try to read poetry amid the sound of shelling and with the smell of blood coming cleanly through the linseed oil soap that she scrubbed her hands with hundreds of times a day. The shelling shook the compound, but she blamed the poetry for keeping her awake. The poems confounded her by alliterating libraries and signifying, well, nothing.

  Ted read verses in a deserted radio station all through his stint in the RAF. Look at him over there now. He is a flier, fighting for altitude, fighting for escape velocity. What he would characterize as transcendence under these circumstances, she would readily identify as bailing out. Leaving her alone, suspended from nothing.

  They vowed their love and pledged eternity the night before, but all of that is, of course, rescindable. The death that has served to distance them has also conjoined their lives to a degree that neither of them is going to be comfortable with. The death card always raises the stakes of the game. Sylvia not only played the card, she also dealt everyone involved what amounts to a live round of death. But what Sylvia, drastic, severe, romantic Sylvia, did not know is that Assia has a life inside her. Her pregnancy should counterbalance Sylvia’s ploy. She has to give her rival her due, though. Sylvia had a poet’s sense of backhanded geometry.

  But still, considering it, the mere fact that she was indeed a poet brought about her downfall. A poet must trust in sentiment wholeheartedly. This was why the idea of a “war poet” struck Assia as such a contradiction in terms. How could one ever get poetry from the cold gut of a warrior? Assia can experience sentiment. She can even feel sentiment. She could never, ever afford to put her faith in it. Sentiment is the tapestry upon the coffin wall. People who have survived death are the ones who have read and rejected what’s written upon that tapestry.

  Sylvia might have kept a bottle of downers about. Ted told her that she was under a doctor’s care. He may have gulped the pills after the medics and the constables departed. It was a good hour before he rallied himself to make the phone calls.

  Then again, he has the constitution of a wildebeest. A few pills might make him morose, but they’d hardly kill him. If he had been serious about proving that imitation is the sincerest sort of flattery, he would have climbed into the oven already.

  A heavy girl with a Portsmouth accent approaches with her mitt extended. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says through her nose, shaking Assia’s bandaged hand. You heard about these Portsmouth girls. They grew up along the wharves and in the shadow of the fleet. They had the intelligence of a goldfish and the speech patterns of a seagull. One of these poet-academics must have married her in a fit of pity. And then ended up feeling sorry for himself.

  “Likewise,” Assia answers.

  The heavy girl blinks and smiles.

  Someone has found a photo album. A single black-and-white shot of Sylvia is taken out of its clear plastic pouch and passed hand-to-hand. A shadow crawls up Sylvia’s cheek. The left ramp of her eyebrow arches higher than the left. You can almost see the hammer mechanism of her mind drawing back.

  “What a pretty girl she was.”

  “Such a waste, in’it?”

  What about a requiem? There’s a record player upstairs and some disks. And that danger of appearing too acclimated and territorial once again. She’s not going to live day-to-day with an audience about, and if Ted thinks that she is about to entertain these people past a decent mourning millisecond, he’ll have to think twice. Maybe if she mentioned it to Abdiel, he would go upstairs and get the hi-fi. But he’s been acting resentful all day. Assia thinks that Abdiel’s way of upholding his dignity in this situation is to try to strip her of hers. He’s roosted there at Ted’s right hand, usurping and overheating her rightful place. She is going to have to find Ted some new friends. That’s going to be difficult. Both of them make lovers much more easily than they make friends. She could turn on the radio. It’s the one that Ted lovingly talks about; the viaduct that channeled the war, his war, into his boyhood room. Too true a Merlin to put away with the residuum of his other boyhood things. She goes over and clicks on the little dial. The circular margin of the radio begins to glow white. She hears a piano playing delicately in the thick of an electrical storm. Just as she is starting to like the effect of the piano juxtaposed with fermenting thunder, the storm passes. The piano comes through clearly. She thinks that it’s Erik Satie. Did Ted undergo lessons as a child? She can’t envision an English boy being spared the ritual of piano instruction. Of course, any reasonable teacher would have taken a look at those fins that he has for hands and would have sent him out to the handball court. Ted is looking over. Abdiel is as well. The radio has gotten their attention.

  Yes, it is Satie. Possibly one of the Gnossiennes. The piano took pride of place at the center of her childhood. The fullness of the notes was thought to be a corollary with language, with the word, the written word. In turn, the written word formed the nucleus of the collective memory. Literature and music were two of several prohibitions against amnesia. There are only two verb tenses used in spoken Hebrew. Perfect and imperfect. This makes for a marked ambiguity regarding time. Everything that is said is said from the perspective of the dead.

  Definitely one of those Gnossiennes. Ted is pointing and mouthing something. His lips go wide and round. They purse. They go wide and round again. He does it several times over. He seems to be saying the word open. The window? Her vivacity? Open up with the charm and jump-start the soirée? She looks over at Abdiel. “Opera,” he calls through cupped hands. “He wants opera!”

  Opera? Assia is more than willing to be supportive and the very last thing she wants to do is spoil the party, but the piano is much more appropriate to the purpose at hand. If Ted wishes to remain aloft in an emotional holding pattern, what he really needs is the chromatic shifts, the subtle rising and falling of the keyboard, buttressed by the intensity of the hammer and lever action. Does Ted have the effrontery to assume that Assia has never fantasized while in a state of bereavement? The dreams that come when a person is in a state of desolation come to stay. And as for opera, well, opera is a series of flame-tailed aerial stunts. Long before they turned on the gas, the Nazis saturated the state airwaves with Wagner and Richard Strauss, softening the national psyche for the dirty work to come.

  Totally inappropriate. Ted’s playing into his wife’s dead hand. She’s sorry, but she has her own dignity to consider. She shakes her head, first at Ted and then at Abdiel. The two men look at each other. Beats me, either set of eyes says to the other. Someone has brought in a factory-sealed box. The ladies open it up with a pair of house shears. Now they remove a large donjon mold of a candle, a slab of unworked wax quartz. A tall man in a dark suit steps forward with a lighter in his hand. Assia has not seen an American army Zippo in years. They were so coveted in the kibbutzim that they were used as a unit of currency. They were push-button prayer candles. The ladies carry the burning mold across the room and set it down on the marble table next to the bust of the veiled woman that Abdiel gave to Sylvia. Earlier, she had the opportunity to ask Abdiel what the occasion of the gift was. He said that there wasn’t any occasion: he was simply afraid that Sylvia might be lonely. So he gave her a carved rock to have around? The stone bust seems to nod in appreciativeness for the candle’s aggrandizement. The shadow upon the floor is that of a shawled Jew in prayer. As though Assia needed another inadvertent reminder that Judaism is not a religion so much as it is an incurable condition. As is, obviously, life.

  Ted and Abdiel are talking together now. Assia turns off the radio. If they’re discussing fune
ral plans, she would like to add her voice. She doesn’t think that the boys quite understand. They have let the bulletin go out over the radio, gathering this flock of skittish magpies here at the scene of the crime. Okay, Sylvia’s afterlife is off to an admirable start, but her catacomb is not going to be big enough to accommodate the entire extended family. What she has to make Ted understand is that if the last note is not the coda, then the music has not ended, disregarding that the instrument may no longer be operable. One has to be careful. One has to be delicate. Sylvia has burned a bridge that was already in a state of disuse, but still Ted finds himself feeling, if not abandoned, then certainly disoriented. The thing to do is to get Sylvia charitably and discreetly into the ground and then emancipate Ted from first the scene and then the memory of the crime. Of the atrocity. Just get him the hell out of this frigid country for a while. She has in mind to have all the observances over by midweek and then book passage on a family sleeper. Take the rails south. Spain or Majorca. Someplace where there is a sun in the sky, heat upon your face, and blood in people’s veins. Where the language that Sylvia spoke to Ted is the exception rather than the norm so that he will not be confronted at random with something she may have once said to him. Assia knows about outdistancing the dead. You do it with blinkers, and you do it with earplugs, or you don’t do it at all. She could ask Abdiel to clear Sylvia’s things from the apartment in their absence. Take the testament of that notebook still lying there on the marble table beneath the bobbing head of the veiled bust and drop it, along with any others, either into the fire or into her grave with her. When the archaeologists open her tomb in another age, they will have little trouble identifying what killed her.