Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  Assia also has an assignment of four longhand pages per day. De Born becomes cross when she does not keep up-to-date. She lies in bed in the afternoon with a cold compress on her forehead. She kneels on the bathroom tiles and holds her head beneath the tub’s tap. She goes downstairs and wedges her head and shoulders into the womb of her ceramic oven, hollering up the rain barrel. The migraine’s toccata runs eventually dissipate within the vacuum. When the attack is over, she places first one bloodless foot and then the other upon the cold kitchen floor. She fears that they will one day find her in there like an Inuit preserved in a vent of ice. Her daughter standing guard.

  She located Sylvia’s bread book in the kitchen cupboard. There was a recipe that struck her fancy. Simnel cakes—which, the recipe instructed, were commonly baked for the fourth Sunday of Lent, otherwise known as “Mothering Sunday.” In addition to the standard eggs, sugar, butter, and flour, the recipe called for raisins, mixed peel, currants, ground almonds, spice, and rum or brandy. When it was done, you decorated it with angelica.

  Ever since she moved into Court Green, there has been the added enticement of consuming beyond her means and provoking Ted’s lawyer, who handles the monthly allowance. He threatens to call Ted and complain when Assia eats up her monthly allotment within a week. Once, she phoned the haute emporium with the lacy curtains in town and asked the attendant over the phone for the most expensive thing that he could sell her. The tins arrived later that day. It was the roe of sea creatures found only in the estuaries of the Caspian and the Danube. That evening her salivary glands began to gush, preparatory to a full-blown cerebrovascular episode. She tasted pungent bits of fine gravel in her saliva that echoed the caviar. She ran into the bathroom, expecting to spit glassy minnows into the sink.

  Assia and he have lived parallel lives out of sync, de Born says. Her memoir, he predicts, will cause quite a stir, make a clean breast of things for her, and it shall, in effect, knit a nice, warm shroud for him. This man of war has led an exclusively intellectual life in the years following the last conflict. He wants to go out like an officer and a gentleman, inspiring terror while closing the door, slowly, gently behind him.

  She crumbles the last of the simnels onto a patch of sunlight upon the wood of the kitchen table. In her sandals, Shura climbs to the top of the chair and kneels in its clapboard lap. She and Mother run their hands through the coarse meal of the broken cake. “Do you remember the currants, and the raisins, and the nuts, and the sweeties?” Assia says. “We creamed it, and we beat it, and we mixed it, and it all came together like the mortar of a bii-iig wall. A bii-iig, safe mama wall. Can you say mama wall ?”

  When she lets Etienne in, Shura will jerk her head out of range of his hand. The old man will take no notice, carrying the sheath of carbon copies to the table along with the yellow legal pad upon which he will utilize his intelligence training to decipher exactly what Assia has attempted to say on paper following their last visit, cracking her code in his nomadic hand. “Ah, yes, my dear, I think that I see,” says the nearly blind man. Shura has those hard blue rubber balls that she hoards. With the grown-ups busy at the kitchen table, she will sneak out to the front of the house and ricochet one ruthlessly against the chimney. The steady rhythm terrorizes Assia during her fits. It is too much like the beating of an anterior heart.

  The writing of the book is very like the disquisition of the bedroom. Insatiability is the unapproachable aim. You can measure your own aptitude only in negative terms. In bed and on paper, you are that which you lack. If only she did not have to perform these tasks naked.

  “I won’t put Sylvia Plath at the center of any memoir of mine,” Assia had said to Etienne.

  “I don’t care to know anything more than what I already know about Sylvia,” said Etienne. “What I do wish to know is what you know about her.”

  She fretted when Etienne categorically rejected the idea of her writing her first draft in Hebrew and then translating from the original, but was secretly relieved. The writing tends to come too close to home as it is.

  Shura’s black eyes project that ardent and slightly recessed sense of intimacy that one would expect to receive from a highly trainable animal. Her doctor said that he could not test Shura’s learning aptitude if she would not speak. He advised that Assia take her to a qualified child psychologist. She thought her daughter too dewy and pristine even to possess a psychology. Other than hers. She is not ready for her child to learn that there are bellwethers out there other than her mother.

  “If you don’t talk,” she says to her daughter, “I’ll never know who you are.”

  Assia checks Shura’s eyes for a flicker of reaction. There’s an avid, fervid, resolute love there. It’s real, of course, but the suggestion of a dull or damaged mind behind it renders this love somehow aloof in all its intensity. Maybe it’s not the kind of love that she would choose, or maybe it is the kind of love that she would choose only in a dire emergency.

  She reaches up with her walnut staff and taps at the window glass. Outside, the driver exits the Bentley. He comes around to the other side of the vehicle and opens Etienne’s door. The old man walks with his elbows riding high, almost as if he’s mimicking wings. There’s a buffoon’s hump in the rise of his back. His knee sockets seem to collapse with each step. A lesser man would give in and die.

  “I like your progress,” Etienne says, sitting at the table, ruffling the manuscript pages.

  “Would you care for—?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself. You’re feeling up to this?”

  “I thought that if you could stay with me for a couple of hours while I write a few pages . . .”

  “Splendid.” Etienne is addressing a direction that well-nigh grazes her left shoulder. “Does the process seem to make you heartsick?”

  This is him. This is Etienne himself. Listen to the anxious precision in that query. Does the process seem to make her heartsick? It’s explicitly a question that he has asked authors thousands of times and one that he no doubt found himself asking Sylvia. He’s less a thinker than a mechanized clock. Time to him, just like the precious God-given gift of the English language, is not an invention but a discovery that terminated previous dark ages, and it must be witnessed to upon demand and safeguarded at all costs. He’s a cuckoo. He’s one of those cuckoos making steady circumvolutions and with an interim floor show of camp drums and birdcalls. Assia hasn’t replied and so de Born says, “Well, I like your progress,” not in a repeating tone but as though for the first time.

  “It doesn’t make me heartsick. I just need you to stay with me a little longer today. For the sake of your inspiration.”

  “Splendid,” he says, shuffling the pages in his hand. “I think that you’re being just a smidgen amnesiac in regard to Sylvia. I kind of like the idea of bridling in and working toward a climactic unveiling. I shouldn’t be saying this, but I didn’t have a singular first impression of her, either.”

  Sylvia? Climactic unveiling? Like a statue? She is hearing now the tempo of Shura’s rubber ball against the exterior bricks of the fireplace. She’s gone out the back door. The sound throbs just behind Assia’s ear.

  David had told her that Ted was quite a prominent figure. “Would you like to listen to him on the radio first before you meet him?” he had asked. Assia drove and David held the map. He could not have directed a red wagon out of a sandbox. They got lost and showed up late. Ted greeted them at the door. Sylvia shook hands and smiled sadly at Assia’s offer to help in the kitchen. She sat them at the table. It was adorned with a vinyl tablecloth that had a jelly texture. The flesh of your forearm wouldn’t be separated without a parting kiss. Assia may have turned in her chair and seen Sylvia moving about in a sleeveless dress, her blanched arms flaccid with then recent maternity. She could have been a grade school teacher or a babysitter. Someone slightly on guard to the prospect of ridicule. Someone gone smug with ill luck. She was oblivious to the fact that her braid had come undone and to those patche
s of alkaline plaque all over her linoleum floor. Ted, David, and Assia were talking. She came to the table carrying a bare crystal serving platter like a child playing pretend with Mother’s Sunday tableware. It took a few moments before Assia realized that the dish was actually a large ashtray. A memento from a World’s Fair held long ago. She thought that this must be the wife of a man who was not facing reality. Ted was likely having his way with her and in spite of her. For the time being, anyway. Obviously, he had married her so that she could keep the home fires, in every sense, burning low. She had not spoken since hello.

  “I do love your neighborhood.”

  Sylvia turned, deadpan. “Are you a model?” Meaning, are you a whore?

  Assia says, “I think that the first time that we met, she was in and out of the room. I remember that her babies were crying.”

  Etienne writes it down, his goggles almost brushing against the writing tablet.

  “I don’t want to go into anything personal about her children, though.”

  He raises his head. “The fact that her children were crying is personal?”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me more.”

  “I don’t know; she wasn’t talkative. At first.”

  “And later?”

  “She served coffee.”

  “Black coffee?” he asks, writing.

  “How did you know?”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And tea cakes, I think.”

  “Coffee and tea cakes?”

  “Do you see what I’m saying? There was always something slightly off.”

  Etienne stops writing.

  “I see. But I get the feeling that you’re pulling back today.”

  “She put the coffee and the tea cakes on the table. She sat down. Then it was matinee time.”

  He’s writing. “What do you mean by matinee time?”

  “You knew her. She had a way of sweeping aside everything that everyone else was talking about—”

  Etienne interrupts, saying, “We can paint that in a positive or negative light. What do you think?”

  “Positive light? You know what she did? She sat down and suddenly she had this other voice, this Grande Dame voice, all perfect inflections. She kept making meaningful eye contact. You know how you look into children’s eyes when you’re telling them scary stories?”

  “Yes. An English accent?”

  “Yes, an English accent. She was going on about how she had lost a nylon at the laundry.”

  He keeps writing. “Her story involved a nylon at the laundry?”

  “That was the gist of it. She went on with it—”

  “A coin laundry?”

  “No, in Primrose Hill, they still have those places where the ladies gather around the hot cropper. They work with rubber gloves and a sieve on a stick. If you walked around the neighborhood, you’d see that every stitch they own is hanging on the line.”

  “She laundered her nylons in a boiling cropper?”

  “Etienne,” Assia says, vexed, “she dipped them with the stick. A simple procedure.”

  “I didn’t know. Where did she end up?”

  “Who?”

  “What was the point of Sylvia’s story?”

  “Sylvia was the point of Sylvia’s story.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Assia manages to get him to abort his reply with a single, deflative exhale. She looks at him for a moment before she continues. “Hours later, okay? She goes back and her nylon is dangling from the low ceiling boards.”

  “Was she happy to have her stocking back?”

  “She said that she had a premonition of swinging from the gallows. End of story.”

  He looks up and turns his head slightly. Assia thinks that the light that makes it unencumbered to the optic nerve at the rear of his right eye, the less damaged one, must arrive on the slant, a river flowing uphill and in a flanking pattern. That northern exposure has to light the entire house. He says, “I asked you if you thought that we should put her eccentricity in a positive or a negative light because I need to know if you see her at base as a victim or a blackguard.”

  “What are the other choices?”

  “Abandoning the book.”

  “You said that the book would not turn on her.”

  “I said that it would turn around your perception of her.”

  Holding a cup of black coffee. With her braid loose. Her equine overbite. Three burning cigarettes aligned against her and the gray smoke moving, as fitful as thought, down the front of her neckline. Chewing a tea cake, she thinks. Her lower lip pouting, funneling her breath upward. Strands rippling.

  “Could this have been the moment when you fell in love with Ted?” Etienne asks.

  Ted acted like it was nothing much, his wife’s behavior. She thinks she glimpsed something in his eyes. He had a lock of pony hair hanging straight down to the bridge of his nose. He had a bruising jaw that compelled a parade-day smile. She liked him. She didn’t like her. She liked them very much as a couple. They were a pair of strange bedfellows to climb between.

  “Assia?”

  She wanted to tell Ted then and there, big, lovely, bruising jaw and rodeo hair, about the war. She longed to tell him that he did not know what she had taken out of boys like him. He did not know the weight that she had held in her hands, thinking no, this one will never survive with me holding so much of him. Then she would be directed to fold the newborn lung or the pancreas in waxed paper and to carry it down the hall into a ward where glass ewers of alcohol were waiting. He did not know about the Sephardi with the patchouli-lacquered penis. He did not know about the man who had given her birth and subjected her to his death. He might have been in a bad marriage, but he knew nothing about the barbarity of love.

  Sylvia started another story. Her first child. The delivery ward. The medical team arrived in their masks and protective eyewear. In her stupor, she thought that they were bundled and blinkered like Arctic runners. They emptied a syringe into the base of her spine, glaciating her hips. One by one her toes fell off and shattered on the floor. A doctor stood alongside with one hand on the crook of her neck and the other holding a stopwatch. He breathed fevered encouragement into her ear.

  “Assia?”

  Her baby had the puckered skin, the epicanthic fold, and the oval head of an Eskimo.

  One of her children woke then in the nursery. Within a moment, both babies were crying. Sylvia left the room and then came back, totally transfomed, with either baby steamed to the flesh below her shoulders. The infants were silent and muddy-eyed, the long tears already evaporating. It struck her at that moment how quickly Sylvia could acquit herself. It was like a costume change.

  “Assia?” Etienne asks. “Do you want to go on?”

  “We had our coffee and she showed us her babies. David and I left.”

  “Was it a friendly parting?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did anyone embrace at the door?”

  She pretends to think about it. “I think that we took a photograph.”

  “Who took the photograph?”

  “Ted. With his arm out. We all crowded in.”

  “Do you have a copy?” Etienne asks.

  Assia says, “It’s upstairs. Why don’t you come up with me and we’ll have some red wine?”

  She has the warm, living bottle, its weight redistributing in her hands as she walks, and the two crystal glasses between her first fingers. The red and quartz colors of the bottle and the glasses trembling like a sundown, gauzy and surreal, as she passes through the window’s light. Shura cat-steps across her path, not turning her little head, not slowing, an ulterior version of Assia’s shadow. Assia continues on toward the madly pitched stairs. The sudden shadow is an emulsive bath.

  “I see that she’s here,” the old man says, lagging at the bottom of the staircase. The blue sun burns, smoky in the wood grain of the foyer. It rises parallel to the corner of Assia’s eye and seeps slowly across her c
ranium.

  “I have to lie down,” she says, entering the bedroom, putting down the bottle and the glasses on the night table, and pulling up her dress, exposing her belly.

  She wants to see. The metallic headdress, that unwanted crown, has fallen so quickly over her eyes. She breathes in the heaviness of cypresses. She can feel Etienne moving, in shadow, unsure, at the other end of the bed.

  “Could you . . . draw that blind? . . . I’m not well.”

  The scrim with the catacomb texture. Deep equatorial colors, unoxidized by light. Macaw stripes. She has heard that angels in Ivory Coast cathedrals wear robes of thick, chaparral colors. Pagan.

  Now the very beginning of the dialogue between the twin drill bits in the hollow behind her eardrums.

  She says, “I want you to help . . . me get pregnant.” She doesn’t want him thinking that this is to be a long-term relationship. She sees his hand rising. She thinks that he has removed his dark glasses.

  “I suspected that we might end up here,” he says. “Good for the writing.” At his age, he doesn’t want her to think that this is going to be a long-term relationship, either. As for getting her pregnant, he is no longer a torchbearer or passer. He’s a clammy blanket that might snuff a flame.

  “Have . . . some . . . wine.”

  She feels nothing. He is as ethereal as a harp on top of her.

  He lifts her wobbly hand. He makes her swear to his soul that this is an everyday occurrence for her. Or else he’s going to phone for an ambulance. He fears having to explain himself, in shackles in the dock, to a man of his years wearing a dark robe. “How is it, then, that you are the one still alive?” he can hear the phantom magistrate saying.