Yellow Silk II

by Lily Pond

  From what she told other people at dinner parties, and from Embassy talk, I gathered that her important work was concerned with helping American companies break into the British market. It was highly abstract in the telling: she provided information about industrial software, did backup for seminars, organized a clearinghouse for legal and commercial alternatives in company formation, and liaised with promotional bodies.

  I hated talking to people about their work. There was, first, this obscure and silly language, and then, inevitably, they asked about my work. I was always reminded, when I told them, of how grand my job as Political Officer sounded, and how little I accomplished.

  These days I lived from Sunday to Sunday, and sex seemed to provide the only meaning to life—what else on earth was so important? There was nothing to compare with two warm bodies in a bed: this was wealth, freedom, and happiness; it was the object of all human endeavor. I was falling in love with Margaret Duboys.

  I also feared losing her, and I hated all the other feelings that were caused by this fear—jealousy, panic, greed. This was love! It was a greater disruption in the body than an illness. But though at certain times I actually felt sick, I wanted her so badly, at other times it seemed to me—and I noted this with satisfaction—as if I had displaced those goddamned cats.

  It was now December. The days were short and clammy-cold; they started late and dark; they ended early in the same darkness, which in London was like faded ink. On one of these dark afternoons Erroll Jeeps came into my office and asked whether he could have a private word with me.

  “Owlie Cooper—remember him?”

  “I met him at your house,” I said.

  “That’s the cat,” Erroll said. “He’s in a bind. He’s a jazzhead—plays trumpet around town in clubs. Thing is, his work permit hasn’t been renewed.”

  “Union trouble?”

  “No, it’s the Home Office, playing tough. He thought it would just be routine, but when he went to renew it they refused. Plus, they told him that he had already overstayed his visit. So he’s here illegally.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Give me a string to pull,” Erroll said.

  “I wish I had one—he seemed a nice guy.”

  “He laughs a little too much, but he’s a great musician.”

  My inspiration came that evening as I walked across Chelsea Bridge to Overstrand Mansions and my apartment. I passed the public phone box on Prince of Wales Drive and thought: Owlie Cooper was a man with a skill to sell—he made music, he was American, he was here to do business. He had a product and he was in demand, so why not treat it as a trade matter, Margaret?

  I saw her the next day and said, “There’s an American here who’s trying to do business with the Brits. He’s got a terrific product, but his visa’s run out. Do you think you can handle it?”

  “Businessman,” she said. “What kind of businessman?”

  “Music.”

  “What kind?” she said. “Publishing, record company, or what?”

  “He makes music,” I said. “Owlie Cooper, the jazzman we met at Jeeps’s house.”

  Margaret sighed and turned back to face her desk. She spoke to her blotter. “He can get his visa in the usual way.”

  “We could help him sell his product here,” I said.

  “Product! He plays the trumpet, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Margaret,” I said, “this guy’s in trouble. He can’t get a job if he hasn’t got a work permit. Look, he’s a good advertisement for American export initiative.”

  “I’d call it cultural initiative. Get Scaduto. He’s the cultural affairs officer. Music is his line.” Then, in a persecuted voice, she said, “Please, I’m busy.”

  “You could pull a string. Skiddoo doesn’t have a string.”

  “This bastard Cooper—”

  “What do you mean, ‘bastard’? He’s a lost soul,” I said. “Why should you be constantly boosting multinational corporations while a solitary man—”

  “I remember him,” Margaret said. “He hates cats.”

  “No, it was dogs. And he doesn’t hate them. He was mocking Al Sanger’s dog.”

  “I distinctly remember,” she said stiffly. “It was cats.”

  There was a catlike hiss in her cross voice as she said

  She said, “People will say I don’t want to help him because he’s black. Actually—I mean, funnily enough—that’s why I do want to help him—because he’s black and probably grew up disadvantaged. But I can’t.”

  “You can!”

  “It’s not my department.”

  I started to speak again, but again she hissed at me. It was not part of a word but a whole warning sound—an undifferentiated hiss of fury and rebuke, as if I were a hulking, brutish stranger. It embarrassed me to think that her secretary was listening to Margaret behaving like one of her own selfish cats.

  It was the only time we had ever talked business, and it was the last time. Owlie Cooper left quietly to live in Amsterdam. He claimed he was a political exile. He wasn’t, of course—he was just one of the many casualties of Anglo-American bureaucracy. But I felt that in time he would become genuinely angry and see us all as enemies; he would get lonelier and duller and lazier in Holland.

  Two weeks later I was calling Margaret from a telephone booth, the sort of squalid public phone box that, when I entered it, excited me with a vivid recollection of her hair and her lips. She began telling me about someone she had found in the house quite by chance, how he had stayed the night and eaten a huge breakfast, and how she was going to fatten him up.

  I had by then already lost the thread of this conversation. I had taken a dislike to her for her treatment of Owlie Cooper. I hated the stink of this phone box, the broken glass and graffiti. What was she talking about? Why was she telling me this?

  I said, “What’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  “The person who spent the night with you.”

  “The little Burmese?” she said. “I haven’t given him a name yet.” My parting words were ineffectual and unmemorable. I just stopped seeing her, canceled our usual date, and Sunday I spent the whole day bleeding in my bedroom. She hardly seemed to notice, or else—and I think this was more likely—she was relieved that I had given up.

  IV. From the North

  “The world moving night to day slowly under our bodies.”

  Creation

  Robert Wrigley

  The sun’s a balm and a blade. They’re blind

  but warm without their clothes,

  having packed a pad and blanket

  most of a snowy mile from the car.

  She slips her boots on and steps off

  into the lee of a pine, to pee

  and leave his leavings in the needles

  underneath. What will the coyotes think

  tonight, that scent, the mingled broths

  taking color from the moon. High up

  the trunk, a wound has oozed

  every autumn for a dozen years,

  the fallen limb a rack of stobs

  they’ve hung their shirts and woolen pants on.

  The palest breath of them rises

  around her thighs, her nipples

  wrinkle hard in the shade, her teeth chatter,

  her breasts quiver and sway

  and in the lenses of her sunglasses

  he sees himself asprawl in the sun.

  They do not own this land, they do not

  live here. No one does,

  except the coyotes and the deer, and the pair

  of gray sparrows flitting overhead,

  eyeing the lunchtime crumbs.

  Dominion is a word, and ownership

  is language. Here, a deed is what they’ve done,

  not unsingable to wits across a page.

  They are mates. They have mated,

  and as he warms her again

  beneath their blanket, they speak of this,

  who bed most often i
n a bed

  among the walls plumb and square,

  the walls of law and human fidelity.

  Mating, he says. Mount.

  It is the only thing, she says,

  to be human in winter.

  Estrus, he says. The curse

  of the cycle. Fun, she replies.

  Recreation, not pro. And maybe

  because they are laughing now,

  the sparrows see their chance and land

  along the blanket’s edges, pluck a crumb

  and fly back up to twitter

  overhead like chimes in an easy breeze.

  The light is wine, and still

  in her boots, she straddles him,

  and the blanket falls,

  and the sun on her shoulders

  is luminous and symbolic. She can see

  in his glasses the bottomless sky,

  he can see in hers, the sparrows,

  working an arm’s half-span away,

  hopping among the folds of cloth

  for a morsel of cheese or an arc of crust,

  and without the lovers knowing,

  a loosened blue thread from the blanket,

  which the birds will weave

  through the twigs and redolent needles,

  come spring, in their nest.

  Then into the Mountains, excerpt

  Lily Pond

  ON THE DRIVE TO THE MOUNTAINS, Mollis wondered about turning back a thousand times. But the lure of seasons grown unfamiliar pulled her. She needed a winter, the white vistas. She needed something devoid of color as she knew it, a return to a starting point, an emptiness that matched something in her, and from which she could move on.

  As she drove east, it was as though she was speeding up the seasons. Although it was nearly winter in the Bay Area it was blooming as it ever was: roses, jasmine, even the spring irises were beginning to send up shoots. Here she passed endless yellowed aspen, graceful against the fog. And ahead was pure thick solid dead of winter.

  Easily she found the group of gathering hikers. She felt a moment of panic as she left her car. She turned her sleeping bag and supplies over to the team leaders, and stepped away for a moment to try to collect her breath before joining the group.

  At the parking lot there, Mollis could not really see any of the vistas she’d imagined. That would come later. Here was just cold, overhanging trees, a cement drive. She felt very small, and more unsure than she had on the drive up, or even moments before. She realized she felt lonely. This was the first time in fifteen years she hadn’t been with Iris, the first time in more than twenty-five away from Steven. She suddenly saw him looming over her again, slapping her. She made herself breathe and walk over to join the group.

  Since they were arriving later in the day, the first hike would be short, only two hours across to the campsite. It would be slow, to be certain everyone got their footing on the snow, found their breathing in the colder air. Walking in the silence was such a relief to Mollis she felt she could cry. How simple. Right foot. Left foot. Breathe in. Breathe out. Though she had vaguely planned to sort things out while she was here she realized that her mind was blank. Maybe the thoughts would return later, but for now the stark black tree trunks against the snow was all her mind could allow.

  An hour into the hike, they came around a bend and the trees opened up. There was an audible gasp from all the hikers. Spread before them was an entire valley, filled with half-domed mountains and sharp-pointed peaks. Snow edged everything, and as it approached dusk the light had just begun to shift to the palest, whitest coral, which reflected on every mountain top. It was like living inside of a prayer. Mollis could feel every hair on her face stand up. Did anything exist but this?

  When they reached the first night’s campsite, a great, soggy, leaden exhaustion hit the whole group; they ate bread with vegetable stew in a sodden silence, some heads nodded mid-meal. Mollis tumbled into the tent with the other woman at the camp and was relieved to see a tarp for her sleeping bag all laid out. She could barely keep her eyes open, unrolled the bag, undressed to her silks and climbed in. As she lay there for a moment she realized she felt like she was still moving, her whole body barreling along the highway at unaccustomed speed, rushing, though unable to move, sucked into the heavy blue-gray of the long highway towards winter, suddenly Steven in the road, her body started, relaxed, suddenly Iris in the road, she jerked, relaxed, and then finally followed a clear road east until it was morning.

  Whereas yesterday she had hiked as the same person, Mollis realized, today she awoke as someone else. The air smelled cold, and exciting. A crystalline quiver hung in the air as the pale bright sun passed over the tops of the trees to light the little valley where they’d slept. After sweetened oatmeal with milk and serious coffee, all taken in silence, the line of hikers hit the trail again.

  The morning hike would be three hours, break for lunch, then four hours, break for dinner, then bed. The day would be fully silent until dinner. As they edged away from the campsite, the silence, the movement, the uncommonly bright blue sky, the white snow everywhere fell together into one whole. Mollis heard herself breathe, felt the icy air on her nostrils, felt her heart beat. She noticed an unusual sensation and identified it as taking up space, and then at the moment of the identification she disappeared, and all was snow-covered branches, reaching with impossible grace upwards, white sheets against the peaks, huge dove wings at quiet rest, blue shadows in curves of snow around each drift, and above it all the mountains which swept like movements of the symphony in which she walked.

  There were tracks of a rabbit, a deer, the scree and chatter of jay and chickadee. These were the prototypes of all animals on the earth, the living representatives of animal innocence; the bright quiet snowbanks emblems of the simplicity of god’s own hand. With no conversation, nothing intruded on her perceptions; she felt herself empty as though she were a vessel through which the mountains echoed. How clean the air smelled, how still the wind. Lord, she had missed winter. Warming, she loosened her belt, opened her collar, removed her gloves, and let them hang by their strings. She felt she could walk forever.

  “Sometimes hikers find that their experience out here is strengthened by their telling the rest of the group why they wanted to come along with us this week. Anyone? …” a hike leader said the first night around the fire.

  A slightly heavyset man across from Mollis needed no prodding. He wore a heavy navy parka, not new. His stubble growing in was dotted with white and his thick eyebrows made it seem that he still wore his sun-goggles, though he’d removed them hours ago. “I’ll tell you why I came,” he began, holding his hands to the fire, then crossing them against his abdomen again.

  He paused for a moment, a little astonished at his own boldness. “I heard a story. I guess you can call it a ‘zen story’ since I’m with this crowd. See, there’s this guy, goes to the post office every day. Well, it’s a postal drop, really, since they automated everything, you know.” He looked around; the listeners nodded. “So this guy, he goes up there every day to take up the mail he’s got from his business. Something like that. I’m not so great telling stories.”

  “No—go on—” everyone murmured.

  “Ok, so since he goes up there every day, he realizes that there’s this really old guy sitting there in this one chair. And this old guy is sitting there every single time he goes up there. See there’s this chair up there. …” He motions “chairness” in the cold air.

  “Day after day, week after week, this guy goes up there with his mail—did I say he was a pretty shy guy?—anyway, every time he goes up there that old guy’s sitting there. So this other guy, he finally gets up his courage, and he says to the old guy, ‘So what are you doing here every day??!’

  “The old guy gets a wizened grin on his face. ‘I’m waiting for the postmaster,’ he says.

  “‘But there is no more postmaster!’ the guy answers. ‘It’s automated! They got rid of him!’

  “
‘I know,’ the old guy says, nodding, grinning all the more.

  “‘And besides!’ the guy added, ‘he died! The old postmaster is dead!’

  “‘I know. I know,’ the old guy says, grinning all the more.

  “‘Well, then, what are you doing here?!’ the guy yelled.

  “The old guy gums his teeth and just keeps smiling. ‘Well,’ he says slowly, ‘. … if he ever does come back, I’ll sure be at the head of the line!’”

  The spokesman breathed a heavy sigh of relief and lowered his forehead to his knees for a second before continuing.

  “My wife died one-and-a-half, no—now almost two years ago. And when I heard that story, I realized that old guy was me. I’m still sitting there so I’ll be at the head of the line.” And he said to himself, “I guess I’m not waiting anymore. …”

  There was an enormous silence after he spoke. Mollis listened to the logs crackling and was suddenly aware of how the temperature had dropped with nightfall, and the terrible cold just beyond the fire.

  Then suddenly a deep voice boomed out, “Hobbes! Name is Hobbes.”

  Everyone looked up quickly and saw the speaker leaning forward and drawing himself up to height. “You kids don’t know how easy you have it!” he bellowed. Around his head was a full mane of thick fur, which matched his cuffs and the bottom of his parka. His moustache gave him the look of a permanent, supercilious frown and his head rested on the back of his shoulders.

  “Goretex! And whatever -tex. When I was young we had to buy moose fur stitched by the Indians out in Hudson River country! You braved the elements and proved a man was a man! … Oh. Sorry ma’am. …” He bowed to the two women in the group. “Man or a lady (long as she had her man somewhere near by. …). And no freeze-dried ‘spanish omelette’ either, I’ll tell you. We had moose meat and stewed apricots and we liked ’em, too. We were alive! And cell-phones! Heh!” He shook his head. “Sure we were frightened! But I wouldn’t have missed those wild nights for the world. Worst thing we had to be afraid of was the lies everybody told about the wilderness. Like Wordsworth said, ‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,’ and that’s the truth. I’ll tell you.” He suddenly stopped, and when he started again his voice was both quieter and gruffer. “And I do love her, will …’til the day that I die . …” Mollis noticed for the first time how small the man really was inside his massive coat, how deep the lines in his face, and wondered at how strong he must have been fifty years earlier.