by Mark Slouka
Stepping barefoot into the warm, soaking grass, the insects screaming in the shoreline trees, Marie Kessler had barely started up the slope of the lawn when suddenly he was there, holding her, his hands following the straps of her dress from her shoulders to her wrists, then quickly over her hips. Pulling her down to the soaking grass, he lay against the wetness and she moved over him, a lover suddenly young again, noticing as from some distant place the shock of his skin against hers, the warmth of his breath in her hair, his mouth sucking at the cut on her hand.
It’s possible, I suppose, that if they had only stayed low on that open lawn, everything might still have passed. But that, I realize now, was neither her way nor her desire: never again would she hesitate on a border. And so, feeling her lover start to lose himself beneath her, Marie Kessler placed her hands on the small of her back and sat up straight into the moonlight. And who but those who have never risked the visible world for dreams half done and gone, could ever hate or blame her?
night—a sketch
I heard something die in the swamp last night. It rose quickly out of the silence, a hoarse, agonized screaming, low and guttural at first, then building to a series of piercing shrieks, and I left the sagging couch and walked to the window, staring past the legions of small, white moths crawling up the screen, as though I might somehow see whatever it was being torn down there in darkness thick as paint.
But the sound didn’t stop, one moment fading like a guttering candle, then rising again, until finally, unable to think of anything else to do, I found myself looking into the little wooden room where our daughter slept, clutching a soiled kangaroo, our boy next to her (the small hollow of his throat etched as clearly as though he were watching the stars in his dreams), all the while certain the sound would wake them, frighten them, and I’d be unable to stop it or explain it away or shape it with any fairy tale fit for a child.
And then, for no apparent reason, I began to grow afraid. Not of the prosaic truth—a snapper dismembering a duck or goose in the slick black muck, or a mink, feral and quick, killing a family of muskrats in the briars by the shore. Not that. Of that sound. My throat tightened; the muscles in my back and neck, in that strange mirroring of passion and fear, stiffened and tensed, and I stood there, staring past the door we’d opened against the heat as though something might come through it, listening to the gurgling and the thrashing and, underlying it all, an orgasmic, boarlike grunt like a ground tone about to explode into some as yet unwritten, unimagined crescendo, and then it was over and a single cicada somewhere high in the trees rose like a fever.
Later that night I awoke from strange, disarticulated dreams and knew, as though it were some great truth the world must instantly be told, that the ancient oracle had been wrong, that the old gods were alive and well, and the Dionysian dark, older than our stories, bigger than death, existed just outside the screen of our customary days.
The next morning my son, barely seven, woke me with a damselfly he’d saved from the lake. It sat, sodden and bent, its abdomen protruding through one gossamer wing, at the end of his little finger (“You know, this damselfly is a very brave person,” he explained), and all I’d dreamed and thought the night before suddenly seemed distant and foolish and wrong. And I guessed at that moment the grain of our fate, the particular shape of our exile: to sense, at dusk or in dreams, the route to our own redemption, the harsh truth of the earth’s equilibrium, its eternal economies of birth and blood, but to know that path as forever closed to us, rightly obscured by our hearts and lies.
“You take care of her,” I said, still waking. “Damselflies turn into fairies at night.” Half an hour later, I found him crouching on a boulder in the morning light, watching her dry her mangled wings.
the lotus eaters
We called it the moonhouse, though it had no moon, having been built thirty years ago by a busy man with no feel for poetry. But moon or not, the Finnsmiths’ moonhouse had presence. Character enough. Nodding slightly forward, eager to please, it leaned just enough to give its visitors the sensation of sitting in a very narrow room on a very narrow ship. The space itself could only be described as intimate. Lean forward too precipitately—to pull down a pair of trousers, say—and your head would hit the door, which, delicately secured by the merest point of a badly placed hook and eye, and encouraged by gravity, would promptly swing open.
And then of course there were the residents: spiders of various sizes and temperaments; small clouds of gnats that hovered over one’s head like the comic-book smudges meant to signify deep thought; paper wasps tending their carefully masticated little buds under the eaves … To sit there—vulnerable, half exposed, a clammy bathing suit around one’s ankles—was to feel the nudge of mortality, to suspect, if only for the barest moment, the utter frailty of human conceits.
But this is not a story about the moonhouse per se, but about the moonhouse as an agency of the gods. The vehicle through which they, on a particular September afternoon in 1966, revealed their divine will.
In those days we lived in Canarsie from October to May, migrating inland just as the water was warming in the shallows and the hills leafed into summer. Billy Finnsmith would be waiting there when we drove up in our dented blue Rambler, when we pushed open the cabin door—closed for six months, swollen in place—when the scent of grass and honeysuckle swept into the corners smelling of mildewed wood like some highspeed re-creation of summer’s victory. And he would be there a full season later, framed in the rear window, watching us bump and scrape down the dirt, leaving boarded windows, a double-locked door, and two chains swinging slightly in a new wind as though still holding the memory of the love seat now propped against the couch in the cottage dark.
The months in between our coming and going I would spend at the Finnsmiths’ cottage, a more or less permanent visitor in a house that seemed to me straight out of some disordered fairy tale: cheerful, messy, utterly unconstrained by the conventions of the world outside its covers. If my mother worried occasionally that I was overstaying my welcome, she was the only one. I attracted no more attention than the box turtles hunkered down under the sagging sofa or the white rats, Sacco and Vanzetti, who lorded over the kitchen counter, expertly turning crusts in their thin, human hands. If there was food enough, and I was hungry, I ate. If not, not.
Define it as you will, theirs, I’m convinced, was a charmed existence. When Billy and Lilly (who were ten and seven at the time), set the dining-room table on fire while their parents were off collecting mushrooms, they threw water on the table (and the curtains) and the fire went out. They didn’t suffer terrible burns over 85 percent of their bodies. The baby didn’t die of smoke inhalation in his crib. Nothing happened. Mr. Finnsmith planed the burned edges off the table, then collected the whorled shavings and gave them to the kittens, who later stitched tiny black pug marks all over the stones of the outside porch. When little Bean, just over a year old, crawled off the end of the dock and fell headfirst into the mud (it was an unusually dry summer that year, and the shore had receded ten yards out), Billy and I happened to walk by while his legs were still wiggling like some weird, antic buoy, and pulled him out. He didn’t suffocate. The trauma didn’t warp his character, leading him, years later, to a life of brutal crime. Mr. Finnsmith gently hosed him down. Mrs. Finnsmith cleaned the mud out of his ears and nose with a Q-tip. An hour later, there he was, butt-naked on the stone porch, holding on to a low branch with one hand, happily gumming a drumstick.
Irresponsible? Reckless? Perhaps they were. Mrs. Finnsmith, I recall, spent most of her time reading novels aloud to the various children sprawled around her in the oversized hammock or conducting (there’s no other word for it) the absurd riot of flowers on the south wall of the cabin. On cool summer mornings, when the spirit moved her, she’d rig a parasol to the oarlock, sit little Bean (naked as always) on a stack of New York Times business sections, and go visiting. When the baby wet itself, soaking through the New York Stock Exchange, she’d ca
lmly peel off the soiled layers and put them in a bag. At night she’d sit cross-legged by the fire, her dark hair shining in the light of the flames, and scare us silent with wonderful, tangled stories of ancient times and grand adventures and ghosts both cruel and kind.
Her husband, for his part, spent his days fishing, painting (there was always paint—ocher and eggshell and rust—crusted in the hair along his temples and the stubble of his jaw), or cobbling something together in his work shed. Every now and then he’d climb with us to the top of the elm and hang there, barefoot and shirtless, swaying in the high wind.
This, I see now, was the land of small pleasures, of present time. Ironic, irreverent, generous, the Finnsmiths depended on no doctrine or dogma, believed in no dietary plan, aspired to no utopian perfection. Humor, companionship, the world of the senses neither strenuously denied nor excessively indulged—these were enough. The result was a strange and wonderful equilibrium, a balance bordering on magic. No one who knew them, I’m sure, could have guessed how difficult their accomplishment really was, how fine the fulcrum, how delicate the balance of their happiness.
John Finnsmith, for all the years I knew him, was a man continually distracted by eternity; sooner or later he’d balance nearly every species of work against the weight of mortality, and find it wanting. Far from making him gloomy or morbid, this point of view (admittedly somber from the outside) made him an unusually cheerful man. It ordered his priorities. “He spent how long doing that?” he’d ask, incredulous, when told of some acquaintance newly emerged, dewy-winged, from the chrysalis of schooling or apprenticeship. “Five years? Jesus!”
If he was lazy, it wasn’t in the vulgar, plebeian sense of the term. He painted, when time allowed, with rigor and passion. He’d taught himself Latin. An amateur ornithologist, he wrote to Roger Tory Peterson suggesting some changes in the description of the head markings on Henslow’s sparrow. I’d seen him work a twelve-hour day painting three-hundred-pound row-boats he’d dragged from the water on a system of home-made winches and pulleys. No, his was a rare, distinctive condition; a sort of spiritual hemophilia. Unlike the mass of men and women who apparently suffer the cuts and indignities of their chosen occupations with relative equanimity, he seemed incapable of enduring work he found uninteresting or unimportant. Every now and then he’d try—pathetically—to talk himself into it, to justify and reason and rationalize, but it was no good. The wound wouldn’t clot. He’d endure for a time—then quit. The Finnsmith family would breathe a sigh of relief, and life would tilt back to plumb.
Which is not to imply that it was easy, that in an age given over to climbing metaphors—to ladders and rungs and pinnacles—Billy’s obstinately earthbound father did not come in for his fair share of grief. The problem, in sum, was this: John Finnsmith didn’t get up at 5:45 every morning in order to catch the 7:12 out of Brewster; he had nothing to say about stock options, company dividends, or the goings-on at shareholders’ meetings; no one had ever seen him in a tie; in his personal pantheon, Henri Matisse and Theodore Gordon (the destitute dean of American dry-fly fishing) sat supreme; Adam Smith held their palette (or patched their waders). All this would have been at least somewhat socially digestible, perhaps, had he only been sorry or sheepish or envious, or, better yet, had the good grace to suffer from some redeeming physical or psychological handicap—alcoholism, for example, or some debilitating nervous disorder. But John Finnsmith, unaccountably, was neither sick nor sorry.
“The problem with John Finnsmith,” explained Mrs. Alice Ebner-Hauptmann, for whom other people’s shortcomings seemed something of an avocation, “is that he’s got no vision, no goals. You’d think he’d want to better himself. But bettering yourself”—and here she’d begin to punctuate her words by poking a forefinger into the rickety Adirondack chair in which she sat, her eyes behind her dusty cat-frame glasses bulging like a frog’s squeezed by some nasty child—“bettering yourself takes work.”
“Hard work,” agreed Eugenia Bartlett, her comrade in criticism.
“Hard work,” echoed Ebner-Hauptmann. “Stick-to-itiveness. Once you start something, you have to stick with it until the end. Nobody said you have to like it.”
“Exactly,” said Bartlett.
“What men like John Finnsmith need is what my Richard had in spades—Sitzfleisch.”
And having settled that John Finnsmith was entirely destitute in this department, and that the best thing for him would be a major if not tragic crisis, something to acquaint his nose with the great grindstone of honest labor, they settled back with their Bloody Marys and shifted their crosshairs slightly to the other members of the Finnsmith clan.
Overall, however, the winds of criticism blew lightly over Billy’s father. It helped, of course, that Mrs. Finnsmith, an intelligent and unusually attractive woman given to wearing loose cotton dresses into her husband’s workshop at odd hours, had an entirely different take on the importance of Sitzfleisch, and thought about stick-to-it-iveness not at all. Mrs. Finnsmith, it seems, had her own priorities, which Mr. Finnsmith, always rushing home from some part-time job or other, seemed to amply share.
But every bloom will have its bugs, and theirs was no exception. The spring Billy turned eight, his father, hard up on forty, sauntered, Job-like, onto a particularly rough patch. His generally successful overtures to the curious world of art galleries and shows began returning with the monotony of messenger pigeons—rejected. Bills long buried and forgotten returned from the dead, suddenly unpaid. Money, always elastic, now turned stubbornly resistant. Things seemed to search him out from afar just so they could expire at his door. And suddenly, like a high-wire artist looking down, John Finnsmith wavered. He’d been wrong. He had nothing. For twelve years he’d played the proverbial grasshopper, singing his lungs out, and now the ants were going to eat him for dinner. He had to do something, anything, and quickly.
Those long accustomed to basking in the sun of health and good fortune often take the slightest cloudlet personally—a sign of divine displeasure if not outright castigation. So it was with Billy’s father. He paced, he raged, he agonized. He thrashed around like a tiger in a tar pit. In a more demonstrative age, he might have rent his mantle, and defiled his horn in the dust.
And then his back gave out. This was the last straw, no better than boils. Instantly reduced to shuffling old age, Billy’s father betook himself outside to sit—figuratively speaking—among the ashes. Billy’s mother, meanwhile, left alone to take care of little Bean, followed the drama of her husband’s crisis of faith with something less than divine patience. Their days grew dark; the house, ripe with the perfume of diapers. Annoying little midges appeared out of nowhere and hovered about the bedroom. Mr. Finnsmith, grim, sat staring into the middle distance, mechanically rubbing his forehead along his receding hairline.
Into this, with supernatural timing, came Simon Brand.
Silk-shirted and eau-de-cologned, he appeared on the path bearing gifts from Saks, from F. A. O. Schwarz, from Milt’s Bagels. Billy and I had been digging a tiger trap near the compost heap (with Mr. Finnsmith in a beach chair nearby, directing our labors), when we looked up and there he was. Gold sparked at the edge of his sleeve, catching an errant sunbeam. In the frames of his sunglasses, far off, as in some distant land, I could see our world: toy trees, a lilliputian cabin, a tiny Billy picking his tiny nose.
“Ask your daddy if he’ll let you play with a new toy,” he said, producing a remote-controlled tank roughly the size of a medium-sized dog.
Billy looked at his father. Mr. Finnsmith nodded.
“Now ask your daddy if he’s got anything in particular against fresh bagels and nova.”
Billy’s mother appeared in the cabin doorway. She’d managed to throw on a dress and put on a bit of makeup. “Hello, Simon,” she said.
Simon Brand had been placed on the earth, apparently, for the sole reason of putting Mr. Finnsmith’s teeth on edge. It was a basic effect, elemental: he drew his ire the way the moo
n draws the tide. It wasn’t just the fact that twenty years ago he’d apparently been one of Mrs. Finnsmith’s college beaus, or that the romance had supposedly been—however briefly, however unsatisfactorily, however long ago, and however insignificantly—consummated. Not that alone. At twenty, shortly after being asked to leave the university (following an elaborate point-shaving scheme that suggested, at least, a certain knack for statistics), Simon Brand had inherited a strategically positioned gas station in White Plains. By twenty-five he was well on his way to being a millionaire. By thirty he’d made a name for himself as a publisher of religious and motivational books and records. By thirty-six he’d owned (and sold) a fast-food franchise named after himself, been named Mamaroneck Entrepreneur of the Year, and made a killing in real estate. Worse, he wouldn’t go away. Coiffed and capped, aggressively fit, he would periodically reappear, emerging from the climate-controlled womb of his Cadillac eager to share his good fortune.
He was impossible to offend. Simon, it often seemed, operated on a different frequency. Wit was useless against him; irony, still worse. Billy’s father, who years ago had reckoned overlong the looks Simon gave his wife, found himself helpless. Throw him out on his ear? Simon brought gifts. Simon told jokes. Simon, clearly, lived to please. Did he offend? It was inadvertent. To resent him would be ridiculous; to feel threatened, a pathetic self-indictment. No, there was nothing left for Mr. Finnsmith to do but chest up to the fact that this particular suitor, having attached himself with lampreylike devotion, wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In normal times, this was a realization John Finnsmith could live with. But these were not normal times.