Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  Margaret leans back in her chair. She runs a hand over her hair. “I felt something, that day, pacing back and forth with Eric holding my elbow, a sense of possibility, of going with what had happened the way they teach you in tai chi, that you move with the aggressor’s energy, not against it. And it came back, at first so fleetingly it would be gone before I’d even recognize it had been there, but then, later, for longer stretches, even a few minutes. The agitation would subside and I could breathe.”

  The maid comes in with a new bowl of cashews. She wipes the damp spots on the tray with a cloth. Reaching behind the curtains, she pulls down the shades. Sealed from the streetlights, the room intensifies, each object gaining the gravitas of things late in the day. She waits by the windows, her red hair electric in the artificial light.

  “That’s fine, Janie. We won’t need anything else.”

  After the girl leaves the room, Margaret continues. “Of course, it got worse before it got better, since once I stopped ranting and raving I had to face how frightened I was of the darkness, that it was dark all the time.”

  Charlotte closes her eyes. On the inside of her lids are shades of black, a shimmering red aureole.

  “And then there was the trial. Having to listen to that sorry excuse for a human being and his sleazy lawyer arguing temporary insanity. That set me back. It was then that I’d think about Eric’s father. Your husband.”

  In the dark, Margaret’s voice seems to Charlotte both lower and more distinct, the words silky and abundant with meaning. “That Eric had told me about him as a warning.”

  Opening her eyes, Charlotte sees Margaret’s face as a triptych: the smooth brow, the opaque glasses, the tranquil mouth.

  “Eric never talked about him again. Later, I’d wonder if I’d imagined the conversation. But then I’d be struggling with some new piece I’d spent all week memorizing from the Braille, practicing it phrase by phrase, and I’d go blank and do something stupid like start to kick the back of the console and Eric would hold my shoulders and exhale deeply and I’d know that he was instructing me to let go, let the music enter me, let myself understand what he was teaching me. Then I’d wonder if he’d told me about his father because he truly believed I was going to be able to play the piano if I let myself or if he just took a risk.”

  Margaret laughs. “That would have been something—if, after all that, it turned out I had a tin ear.” The pleasure in the thought sweeps across her cheeks. She runs her thumb over what Charlotte realizes must be a Braille watch. “Good Lord, is that right? Is it nearly seven thirty?”

  Charlotte looks at her own watch. “Yes.”

  “I wish I could invite you to stay for dinner, but I have a date.”

  “I’m so sorry, lingering on like this.” A date. Charlotte has never known a grown woman to have a date.

  “We’re meeting at the Museum of Natural History. They’re open late tonight. Will you walk with me? It’s only a few blocks south.”

  Charlotte nods and then—flustered because of course Margaret can’t see the gesture and anxious too about the evening and finding her way to her brother’s apartment, figuring out how to park the pickup overnight—blurts, “Sure, I mean yes, of course.”

  Margaret rings the silver bell.

  “Our coats, Janie, please.” A moment later, the maid returns with Charlotte’s stiff green parka and Margaret’s soft camel’s hair.

  *

  Once inside the museum, Margaret switches her hand from atop Charlotte’s arm to beneath so that she is now leading them. They’re in a rotunda surrounded by murals of scenes from primitive cultures: loinclothed men, women with sleek hair that falls to their waists. Two enormous dinosaurs fill the middle of the room, one with an elongated neck, arched like a great giraffe, the other thick and compact with an immense pointy-toothed jaw, its left leg bent in preparation for attack.

  “Oh, my,” Charlotte says.

  “It’s called Barosaurus Defends Her Young. They’ve redone the models so the tails arch up like birds’. Before, when I was a kid, the tail of the barosaurus—that’s the taller one—dragged on the floor like a lizard’s.”

  Her young? Charlotte looks more closely. Crouched behind the barosaurus is a smaller dinosaur, its legs astride the mother’s tail, its head no larger than the mother’s ankle bone.

  Margaret squeezes Charlotte’s arm. “Come, I’m meeting my friend on the fourth floor in the old dino room.”

  Margaret leads them to the left of the admission booth toward a wide staircase. Whereas the rotunda was bright and cheerful, the stairwell has the musty smell of old buildings where even new paint every two years fails to foil the dankness. She releases Charlotte’s arm, grips the banister, and marches up the stairs with Charlotte following two steps behind.

  At the top of the stairs, Margaret takes Charlotte’s arm again. They walk down a corridor with no doorways, no exhibits. Could Margaret be lost?

  “Here, to the right,” Margaret says, and suddenly they are in a room as sprawling as a high school gym. Glass cases line the walls and, in the center, there is another grouping of dinosaur skeletons—even larger than the ones below. There are no other people save for an elderly guard with broken blood vessels on his cheeks. He sticks his thumb in the book he’d been reading. “Evening, Doc,” he calls out.

  “Jim, how are you? Your wife?”

  “Fine, fine. The missus is doing better. Up and about like her old self.” He taps the book against his thigh. “You just tell me when.”

  Margaret steers Charlotte to the center of the room. “You have to walk all the way around to really see them.”

  When they reach the railing surrounding the dinosaurs, Margaret lets go of Charlotte’s arm and moves ahead. Late Cretaceous, Charlotte reads on the placard, from North America. Looking more carefully, she can distinguish the three different specimens: the sad, cow-faced anatosaurus, a water-loving beast, she reads, who feasted on the plants along the river and lakeshores; the three-horned triceratops, also a vegetarian but able with its armored back to fight off attackers; and, the largest, the bullying snake-clawed tyrannosaurus, with carving knives for teeth and an appetite for meat.

  Margaret stops by the skull of the tyrannosaurus. The yard-long jaw gapes, the hind legs thick as tree trunks, the tail a magnificent cord, stretching back the length of five men.

  “That jaw!” Charlotte says.

  “When I was a kid, my father took us here the first Sunday of every month. We’d travel in by train from Newark. Always, he’d say the same thing: Now, children, don’t get the old daddy mad.”

  Margaret waves a hand at the guard.

  “Okay, Doc.” He walks to the entranceway, where he stands with his back to the room.

  “Now I come here nearly every week, to this room. I don’t know if it’s because this guy’s so big or because it’s something I’d seen so many times, but when I take off my glasses it feels like I can see him.”

  Margaret touches the arm of her glasses. “If you’d close your eyes,” she says.

  Charlotte turns away from Margaret so she is facing the duck-billed anatosaurus. She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens her lids a tiny fraction. The anatosaurus looms toward her, the spaces between the bones occluded by the haze of her lashes. Viewed this way, the dinosaur seems almost full-bodied, as though flesh has found its way back onto the skeleton.

  Charlotte leans against the rail. A warm heaviness seeps down her limbs. How had these tremendous creatures been vanquished? What could have extinguished them? And then, as if set loose from the bottom of an old deep well, an image, static like a photograph, comes toward her: Wen in a racing stride, his weight on his right skate, the left held tautly behind, her first sight of him moving over the ice, she and Rachel Bigsby huddled together in the stands. Unable to see Wen’s face under the helmet, she’d studied his body: the tremendous compression, an economy of concentration and action, eyes locked on the puck. A determination, Charlotte had thought, not simply to w
in that game—which they had—but to triumph over his own muscles, over that sweet, soporific sluggishness beckoning, always, release, release and die.

  “Done, Jim,” Margaret calls out.

  Jim turns, ushering in a short man, clad in a belted black raincoat, too crisp, Charlotte thinks, to have ever been used in the rain. Bald but with a plump babyishness in his face, he beams as he moves toward them.

  “Looking at the old tyrant, Margaret?”

  “Yes, poor Charlotte’s had to stand here with her eyes closed.” The man tilts his face upward and kisses Margaret on the cheek. Margaret’s fingers graze Charlotte’s back. “This is Eric’s mother.”

  The man’s eyebrows dart up but his look of surprise quickly disappears behind another of his beaming smiles. “Well, well,” he says to Charlotte, “When will our peripatetic musicologist be back?”

  Charlotte stiffens. “December,” Margaret answers for her. “Or January or February,” she adds, her voice bouncing over the words. The man glances at a large gold watch. “My dear,” he says, tapping Margaret’s nose, “I’m afraid we’d better scoot along. Our reservation is for eight forty-five and they’re Nazis about the time.”

  Margaret takes Charlotte’s hands between her own. “Cold hands, warm heart.” She bows her head and kisses Charlotte’s fingers. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

  The baby-faced man encircles Margaret’s waist. “Good to meet you,” he says, and then they are off and Charlotte is so taken aback by the sight of the two of them from the rear, Margaret towering above, her dark hair glossy next to his pale scalp, his black raincoated arm swept around her camel’s hair coat, that it isn’t until they are already at the door, their goodbyes to Jim echoing behind, that Charlotte realizes she and Margaret never discussed what Margaret will tell Eric.

  Fleetingly, she feels an impulse to chase after Margaret, to catch her and her date halfway down the stairs, but it no longer seems to matter. Wen died, Eric will be told.

  Facing the grouping of dinosaurs is a well-worn mahogany bench. Charlotte lowers herself onto the seat. From here, the tyrannosaurus looks even larger, perhaps how it appeared to smaller animals creeping through the grasses. Larger, though, in an absurd and vulnerable way, like the story she recalls from high school about Xerxes’s ships defeated when they couldn’t turn around in the channel. Was this how Wen had seemed to Eric, not simply bullying but also pitiable? Helpless. Blinded. Doomed. Always, when she’s thought about them, about their threesome, she’s seen Wen coiled to pounce, Eric and she hidden in retreat. Her remorse has always been about Eric, that she didn’t intervene, that she let him be driven out. Now, though, this seems wrong. What she sees is Eric, his face easy and relaxed, a hand resting on the piano, his torso curled over Margaret.

  In the distance, an electronic bell sounds, a long ring followed by two short blasts. Charlotte tries to picture Eric and Wen as they are at this instant. Eric, his skin golden from the Indonesian sun, a batik shirt, palm trees—are there palm trees? Wen, so shrunken the undertaker had to pin the back of the brown suit she’d buried him in, the white cords of his neck visible over the unfamiliar tie, his face—hadn’t she read that the hair keeps growing underground?—covered with whiskers.

  Behind her, Charlotte hears the guard’s voice, “Closing in fifteen minutes,” and then softly, or is it shyly, “Ma’am.” They seem far away, her husband and son, apparitions that require conjuring. Her mind drifts to the awareness of her own heart beating and the feeling brewing inside her: fear—trepidation about moving from this bench, from this room of bones, about venturing out, alone, onto the darkened city streets—but underneath, swimming low, tremulous, quivering, excitement too.

  Raya in Rapahu

  Shortly before midnight—eighty-seven days after her mother, Raya, walked in front of a bread truck that sent her soaring diagonally across the street, her flight halted only by the crash of her head into the door of a parked car, leaving her locked in another reality that Marnie imagines sometimes as a long deep sleep during which the body tends to itself (though, in Raya’s case, with the help of tubes going in and out of her orifices) while the mind wanders through a cineplex infinitum, and, at other times, as a terrible and lonely claustrophobia, akin to being trapped in a mine shaft with limbs pinned by the walls and air sweet from lack of oxygen—Marnie lifts her rather substantial leg over the edge of the tub and dips a big toe into the steaming water.

  When the doorbell rings, Marnie, still soaking, is jolted from a reverie (her work: the way she finds the kernels for her children’s stories) about a creature, swift and cunning like a wood thrush with a crest of plumules a peacock would envy, who flies into a dank, bat-ridden cave to retrieve a key to … to the universe. Damn you, she thinks, both about Ben, her ex-husband, and the only person who would visit without calling, and Julio, the night doorman for whom Ben once did some free printing work, who lets Ben come up without announcement.

  Damp under her terry-cloth robe, Marnie pads through the living room with its bay window from which if you lean far out and look west you can see a patch of the Hudson and unlocks the sequence of bolts Ben installed before moving out nine years ago. Then, at twenty-six, she’d been a young divorcée; now the building houses a half dozen other women of Marnie’s age also with a marriage behind them.

  Ben hands Marnie a bag of kosher Chinese takeout. His dark hair is flecked with snow. With the collar of his leather jacket turned up over his thick neck, he looks like a Jewish version of an Irish thug from a thirties movie, only an inch or two taller than Marnie but with shoulders twice as broad; indeed, some of Ben’s printing shop clients (Marnie thinks of Mesoni—a guy rumored to have used Mob connections to get the contract to grind the city’s used subway cars into spools of wire) suggest something B-grade, a world where the action passes in warehouses, landfills, and container-ship yards.

  “Ellie?”

  Ben nods and follows Marnie into the kitchen. He leans against the counter while she fills a teakettle.

  “What happened?”

  “She’s back to wanting to keep it. The social worker told her they take the baby right after delivery—to make it easier on the mother. She came home bawling her eyes out, that she can’t go through with it, can’t let them cut the umbilical cord and then that’s it.” Ben shudders.

  “Is she just upset or do you think she means it?”

  “I don’t know. She’s got that midwestern bullheadedness where there’s a right and a wrong and nothing in between. It was that way with the abortion; she wouldn’t even consider it.”

  Ben helps himself to a beer from a six-pack he left in Marnie’s refrigerator last week. Marnie refrains from commenting on the irony of Ben talking about Ellie’s bullheadedness given that it is his refusal to marry a woman who’s not Jewish despite his loving Ellie and her tearful pleas that she’d happily convert that has led to this plan that she’ll give up the child. From the demise of their own marriage, Marnie knows that Ben’s religious commitments are an immutable subject—that although he was aware from the outset that she lacked religious feeling, that her mother’s perfunctory hand-waving about the holidays had left Marnie with no more than a mild sentimental attachment to the rituals, the family seders having seemed as secular as Christmas trees, he couldn’t accept her wish after a year of their marriage to cease keeping a kosher home. “Why do I have to participate in your Jewish practice?” Marnie had cried. “Why can’t you do that independently of me?” Unable to face another year engaged in traditions that felt meaningless to her, she’d suggested counseling with a woman rabbi from the Columbia Hillel. A week later, she and Ben had sat side by side on the rabbi’s chintz couch while the rabbi gently explained that the heart of Judaism is in the home and Marnie felt her own heart miss a beat and then pound out of control as she realized how mistaken she’d been to think that Ben’s religious life could, like the printing business he’d taken over from his father and his passion for the track and Miles Davis, be part
of his private sphere.

  Marnie takes out plates and serving spoons. “And if she keeps the baby, what will you do?”

  Ben spears a fried wonton with a chopstick. “I always told her I’d support her and the baby if she wants to keep it. I just won’t be the father.”

  “How can you not be the father?”

  “I won’t live with them. I won’t give the baby my name.”

  Marnie opens the other boxes: chicken with cashews, beef submerged in brown sauce, sesame noodles. Ben eats quickly with his bushy brows furrowed. When the kettle whistles, she pours hot water into mugs and joins him at the table.

  “I told her, I told her before I even slept with her, that I could only marry a Jewish woman. She laughed and said I’d be an old man before she was ready to marry and what made me think she’d ever marry me.”

  Marnie smiles. On the one occasion she met Ellie, she’d liked her—a skinny girl with a long red braid and a SLAUGHTER THE POLYESTER button who’d come to New York to study with the Feld dance troupe, worked nights in a copy shop on upper Broadway, and rode Rollerblades to work. The only way Marnie can imagine Ellie eight months pregnant is as a child’s line drawing with sticks for arms and legs and a striped beach ball for a belly.

  Ben puts down his fork and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin. His eyes trace Marnie’s skin from the vee in her robe up to her forehead. He purses his lips as though to say, See, look what you set in motion, and then reaches out to touch Marnie’s cheek.

  *

  Marnie wakes in the middle of the night. Ben breathes heavily, a shade short of a snore. Without looking at the clock, she knows it’s 3:52—the insomniac’s witching hour. All week, she’s bolted awake at exactly this time, a sudden waking without dream fragments or the residue of sleep. Instead, there have been a flood of memories, as if her mother’s coma (the jellied surface of Raya’s brain having been shaken so hard, the neurologist explained, it was left bruised and bleeding), falling less than a year after the death of Marnie’s father, Thomas, has unleashed a swarm of images from a hidden fold in Marnie’s own cortex.