by Anna Journey
I eloped in ripped jeans, sandals, and a shirt of ivory lace, standing on the cliff edge of a dirt-covered stagecoach turnabout, in the mountains above Avalon. The ceremony’s officiate, Anni, and her husband drove my husband-to-be, David, and me up the island’s mountain roads in their shuddery, cherry-red Volkswagen bus. Watching Anni’s dyed-orange hair flap in the wind from the cracked window made me recall a phrase from Norman Dubie’s poem “Ars Poetica” in which the jilted, strawberry-blond muse has hair “[t]hat second chaste coat of red on the pomegranate.” In the poem, a man tricks a woman—a worker from a nearby cigarette factory who’s missing her left thumb—into stripping off her clothes. He then swims off with the bundle into the night surf, leaving her nude and alone on the beach as a joke. “Dubie’s saying,” my poetry teacher, Lee, had explained, “Don’t fuck with the muse.”
The stagecoach turnabout in Avalon was flanked in ancient, gauzy-barked eucalyptus and a hip-high cedar fence. In the nineteenth century, the loop allowed a bulky coach to change direction with ease, so the horses wouldn’t stumble trying to turn around on the narrow path and send everyone over the cliff. As David and I stepped from the van, menthol oil wafted from the trees’ sage-green leaves. I can’t smell the air around a eucalyptus without conjuring the scent of the cigarettes I smoked in high school—the mentholated Newports I’d suck down between lunch and gym class in the graffitied bathroom stalls. Once, after reading Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” in my tenth-grade creative writing class, I scrawled the poem’s final tercet in Wite-Out over the olive-colored wall: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” The air hung sharp with menthol vapors on the day I married, and there in the trees wavered a line of pale girls exhaling their time-warped incense of smoke.
In ninth grade, I’d sometimes play the Cigarette Game with my friend Laura, who drew black tears in the corners of her eyes with liquid liner and who would soon drop out of school due to her pregnancy. We’d sit on my front stoop, drop a lit Newport or Camel, lengthwise, between our forearms, and press our flesh together so the hot pinch of the cherry singed both of our skins. The first person to jerk away from the burn lost, though both of us would share a matching set of nine dime-sized scars. Alone, I once sat cross-legged on my carpet and heated the bottom loop of a steel coat hanger with my lighter, branding my own left bicep: three inch-long parallel burns now faded to white and flecked with maple-colored freckles split along the rippled scar tissue into the strange Vs of birds’ feet.
After Laura and I painted a nightmarish mural of bloody handprints and anarchy symbols—using our actual blood—across one of my bedroom walls, which made my mother cry, my parents checked me into the adolescent wing of Dominion Hospital, a mental health facility in suburban Falls Church, where I met other high school girls from northern Virginia with problems more serious than my own. My roommate Pradeepa told me, as we sat facing each other on our parallel twin beds, that after her boyfriend had broken up with her, she’d climbed into her bathtub at home, pulled a plastic grocery sack over her head, then cinched and tied the handles beneath her chin. Her older brother had heard her crying and yanked the bathroom door off its hinges to reach her. Another girl, Sarah, looked like an athletic freshman volleyball player in her baggy T-shirt and gym shorts until she stood up to reveal her skeletal legs, bony and disproportionate as a foal’s. Allison, a quiet fifteen-year-old with six-inch vertical scars running up her wrists, rose in the middle of lunch one day, snapped her plastic spork in half to make a blade, and started carving at her left forearm as other patients began to gasp and shriek. Each night a nurse on the late shift would do “bed checks” every half hour, opening the door to peer inside, throwing a narrow slice of light into the room.
In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman notes that migrating monarch butterflies prefer to rest in coastal eucalyptus groves because the pungent oil helps keep predatory insects and blue jays at bay. This way, the butterflies sleep within a kind of fragrant force field.
Two months before we eloped, David and I lay in bed with the windows open. The scents from the night garden sifted through our screens: the neighbor’s white-starred hedge of jasmine, the raw olive-smell of the beach fog, the sweet pools of condensation on the coral tips of the finger mound—that bizarre, Martian-like succulent. I was thinking about the dream David had had a couple of weeks earlier: we flew to Rome to get married and rented a room at the end of a crimson-carpeted marble staircase, in a hotel just off the Piazza di Spagna. In the dream, getting a marriage license became a Kafka-level bureaucratic hassle. David would run to and from our hotel, up and down the staircase, with a stack of paperwork, only to discover that each time, upon arrival, we were missing a form. “Oh, yeah?” I’d said. I said nothing else, but each night, for two weeks, I went to sleep smiling. “You know your dream about Rome?” I finally asked as we lay in bed that night, listening to the neighbor drag her trashcan to the curb. “Ever think about doing that kind of thing in real life?”
A year after my hospitalization, I found ways to escape, through literature, my life in suburban Fairfax, Virginia—its beige, 1970s ranch houses and pruned sugar maples in each yard. I read fantasy books about the taboo love affair between Robin Hood and Maid Marian, the heroic adventures of hobbits and elves, and the fantastical legends of Merlin, Queen Guinevere, and King Arthur. I taped a map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth to my bedroom wall, wrinkling and staining the paper with green tea to make the drawing of the realm seem more aged, more credibly a relic. I thought wearing velvet dresses with princess sleeves would seem too conspicuously sentimental, so I wore royal blue crushed-velvet bell-bottoms with peasant blouses to feel more fantasy maiden than suburban teen. I even managed to convince my parents to buy me a twenty-two-string Celtic lap harp, on which I learned to pluck the ballad “Scarborough Fair” and the theme song from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, “A Time for Us.” Sometimes I’d sit on a log in the backyard, under a wild dogwood, even though the burls made for a less-than-magical cushion. Once a little boy crept across the woods and spied on my practicing.
Before I married David, I lived for nearly seven years in the company of one red-bearded man, three upright basses, one electric bass, two fiddles, numerous acoustic and electric guitars, a banjo, two full-sized keyboards, a ukulele, a mandolin, a theremin, a singing saw, and a kazoo-like instrument of my then boyfriend’s invention called the “dildophone,” which involved a silicone dildo banded by its beige root—in imitation of a trombone’s brass slide—to the narrow end of a yellow kitchen funnel. This was the richly textured atmosphere of the longest relationship I’ve had during my adult life—my time with Carrick, the warm and gregarious musician from Appalachia with whom I lived for three years in Richmond, Virginia, and for another three and a half in Houston, Texas. In many ways, Carrick and I complemented each other—his goofy spontaneity to my obsessive focus, his center-stage gusto to my quiet reserve—although our childish arguments seemed to arise from similarly volatile temperaments. After years of bellowing at each other across the house, throwing books or cushions, and slamming doors, we were used to the chaos. But perhaps due to the fact of our longevity, the dynamic didn’t feel extreme. Recently, as I lay in bed reading, it wasn’t any of our numerous habitual activities—the bayou hikes, the nights with wine under our live oak, the fights about Carrick giving up his bands to move to Houston with me—that I recalled. It was our visit, early in the relationship, to an art exhibition in DC that re-created, in three dimensions, famous paintings by Vincent van Gogh. We’d waited until other museum guests emptied out of the life-sized Bedroom in Arles and then stepped into the simulated depths of the eggshell-blue and yellow room crowded with pale maple furniture. Because of the torqued perspective, van Gogh’s trapezoidal hardwood floor sloped up toward the far wall, and the ceiling slanted down like an attic’s, until we had to lower our heads, like Lewis Carroll’s enlarged Alice. For a moment, Carrick and I sat on th
e bed in the corner, grinning and briefly magical figures, next to a folded red blanket.
At various times in my life, I’ve been told I could pass for one of those red-haired maidens found in paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites, a circumstance that both amuses and embarrasses me. Once it was a man buying mulch when I worked as a cashier in the garden section of Lowe’s hardware shop. I’d been leaning on a grey stone display fountain tiered in blue rows of potted delphinium. Once it was a girl tripping on a headful of acid, who spun in circles with Carrick and me as we danced at a Flaming Lips concert in Norfolk. Most recently, it was Susan, a friend of David’s, who sent me an e-mail after she saw the wedding photograph in which David and I make peace signs with our right hands as we stand in front of Anni’s Volkswagen, my bouquet of sunflowers jammed in the bus’s windshield wipers. “Love the fact that you chose Avalon—the place of immortality—for your wedding,” Susan wrote. “And you, starring as Morgan le Fay . . . check out the Pre-Raphaelite painting of her by Frederick Sandys. In it, Morgan has hair astonishingly like yours! (Though she’s wearing a bit more clothing . . . most of it not for you, but the leopard skin might make a great sarong.)”
Sandys—a debt-ridden and never popular painter—lived for a time in Chelsea with one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who admired the exacting, sensual lines and somber beauty of Sandys’s works. Many women obsess Sandys’s canvases, particularly mythology’s femmes fatales: Helen of Troy, Morgan le Fay, Medea, and the Arthurian temptress Vivien, who seduces Merlin to discover his secrets. Many women, too, populate Sandys’s love life: Georgiana Creed, his first wife; Keomi Gray, who modeled for many of his paintings; and Mary Emma Jones, a young actress with whom he had nine children.
In Sandys’s Morgan le Fay; Queen of Avalon, Morgan stands, gesticulant in a flowing emerald gown draped in leopard skin and golden fabric. She wears a crimson-and-lavender cape in a room crowded with red tapestries and carved wooden knickknacks and alchemic objects. An open book and a scroll lie on the floor at her feet. Instead of the omnipotent satisfaction or manic self-regard of a witch caught mid-spell, there’s a melancholic intensity to Morgan’s torqued lips and downcast eyes. It’s as if her incantation is fraught with desperation. Maybe she strives to close the wound of her half-brother Arthur. Maybe the king’s fate depends on the magic of her words.
I tried to come up with some magical words of my own to read during the elopement ceremony. I began writing a poem for David to celebrate our union, my first epithalamium. In the poem, a newlywed couple sits on a seaside balcony, sharing an heirloom tomato. I typed the title, “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean,” which quickly took an ominous swerve: “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned.” The island’s dark history had slipped into my would-be love poem.
On November 29, 1981, the actress Natalie Wood slipped from a yacht anchored off the shores of Catalina and drowned. She’d been drinking wine all evening with her husband Robert Wagner and the actor Christopher Walken, her costar in the in-progress sci-fi film Brainstorm. Allegedly, after Walken suggested that Wood spend more time starring in films and less time caring for her two young children, Wagner smashed a wine bottle on the table, causing Wood to flee to the cabin below. When Wood’s body was discovered the next day floating in the Pacific, she was wearing a down jacket over her nightgown, and socks. The heaviness of her wet clothes must’ve dragged her under. And the coroner found on the side of the yacht’s rubber dinghy a series of scratch marks. She may have heard the loose dinghy banging against the side of the boat, stooped to tighten the rope, and slipped on the swim step. In my poem, the speaker thinks she sees a phantom: Wood’s briny scratches emerge in the tomato skin’s salty pleats. She imagines the fruit she shares with her husband must have sprouted from an heirloom seed that washed ashore, decades ago, from the yacht—that the actress must’ve placed a gelatinous green wafer of tomato on her tongue sometime before she rolled into the water. “I’ll never be able to read this damn poem at my wedding,” I thought.
Instead of my epithalamium-turned-elegy, I selected a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to Emanuel von Bodman, written in 1901:
It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints to the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A “togetherness” between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them, which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
When Rilke wrote, at the turn of the century, about the importance of lovers guarding one another’s solitude, stagecoaches still roamed the back roads above Avalon. As David and I clattered in Anni’s van along the winding dirt paths of the island’s menthol-saturated interior, we decided that the florist had wrapped my sunflower bouquet too tightly in white ribbon (“Like an amputee’s stump,” David joked), and we began to unwind the stems. The ribbon grew longer and more diaphanous. We retied the bow into something freer, more appealingly askew.
I’d met David at a literary conference on the work of the late poet Larry Levis, at Virginia Commonwealth University. Lee had invited both of us to Richmond for the event: I was to participate in a panel at my alma mater and present a paper on Levis’s work, and David was scheduled to give a poetry reading; he’d been one of Levis’s closest friends, first in Fresno and then in Iowa City, eventually editing several of Levis’s posthumous collections. At the time, I was still living with Carrick in Houston as I completed the final semester of my PhD, both of us miserable yet invested in our hope that moving back to Virginia would somehow solve all of our problems. Nevertheless, I found myself meeting David for drinks at the bar of the Jefferson, Richmond’s grandest old hotel. I’d admired David’s poetry since I was an MFA student and had even sent him a copy of my first book of poems. We’d exchanged friendly e-mails for over a year. “It’s just a drink,” I’d shrugged to myself, glancing down at my watch, then up at the marble columns, stained-glass windows, and gold-leafed ceilings. I’d even told Carrick in advance about my cocktail plans. As I waited for David to appear, I flipped through a pamphlet about the fountains in the Jefferson’s Palm Court, once home to a small population of tame alligators during the Jazz Age, including a creature named Old Pompey. One night, an alligator had allegedly slithered from its marble pool and into the hotel library, where an elderly woman who’d been sipping sherry as she browsed through books mistook the creature for a leather footstool, crossing her ankles over the reptile’s cool back. When the “footstool” began to crawl, the woman screamed and fled from the room. Witnesses were divided about whether or not to believe her, as the alligator had vanished, and she vowed never to drink sherry again. As I sipped my amber Bellini, I peered over the lips of the champagne flute as a man with a trim silver beard and a black leather jacket appeared in the doorway of the Jefferson’s bar, the mahogany walls shimmering from the tea lights.
As we drew near the wedding site, Anni began to tell us about the island’s javelina infestation. Ten years earlier, Catalina had teemed with an overpopulation of bristly, brown, dwarf-hippo-shaped “skunk pigs” and so local officials contracted a team of Midwestern hunters to fly in and thin the herds with machine gun fire. “I think Anni’s trying to outdo my epithalamium,” I whispered to David. Anni continued, recalling how the whole island reeked for weeks from the shot and rotting carcasses that stacked the hillsides. She’d drive to work, leading
couples to various scenic island peaks to say their vows, and packs of black-eyed orphaned javelina would stampede from the groves, crossing the path of the van. Swarms of yellow jackets soon rose from the decaying meat, so the islanders then faced a winged plague. The javelina hunters had to switch from shooting Avalon’s skunk pigs to poisoning insect nests with soap.
Although most brides likely would’ve been furious to receive such a gruesome, corpse-strewn send-off into holy matrimony, I loved the story. It gave texture and depth to an otherwise stilted scene: two couples—formerly strangers—in a van filled with beach-mart champagne; my mangled sunflowers; my feeling ridiculous about booming Rilkean proclamations from a seaside cliff. If javelina feel threatened, I learned, they rub their tusks together to create a rough, chattering sound. I imagined Avalon’s forests must have echoed so profoundly that the whole island couldn’t sleep, even King Arthur. I imagined the dark seed of the heirloom tomato stretched back to an ancestor once plucked up by Natalie Wood, linking all of us in its fine, slow helix.
As the van stopped at the stagecoach turnabout and I slid open the door, I imagined Morgan le Fay finally finding the right words as she whispered over the wound, and the wound as it healed and shut.
THE GUINEVERES
My mother’s always marveled at Ted Bundy’s charisma, his trick with the fake injuries, his voluminous hairdo. Throughout my childhood she’d recite the serial killer’s murderous steps like a mantra—the arm sling, the dropped stack of books, the women Bundy shoved into his white Volkswagen Beetle. “Don’t ever get into a stranger’s car,” she warned my younger sister and me. At the dinner table, she’d describe Trotsky’s death by ice pick to his skull—a topic often triggered when my sister, my father, and I thrust our miniature yellow corncob handles into either side of the grilled and buttered ears. She’d tell the tale in a hushed tone, as if the Marxist’s assassination were her own personal gossip. I enjoyed how the weapon in the story morphed from ice pick to splitting ax to bread knife, depending on my mother’s dining utensil. Another frequent cameo in my mother’s dinnertime anecdotes was Travis, the pet chimpanzee who went berserk one day at his home in Connecticut and gnawed off a woman’s face. But the story my mother repeated with particular urgency was Rosie’s: the ten-year-old kidnapped from our neighborhood in 1989, whose smothered body was discovered under the branches of a pine. My mother told us about Rosie’s murder so often that, as I walked home from school one afternoon in seventh grade and a middle-aged Asian American couple pulled over in their van, my stomach seized up. As the woman in the passenger’s seat unfolded a map and asked me about the location of Zion Road, I sprinted off, my green backpack flapping against my spine. I was determined not to let that pair of expertly disguised serial killers throttle me and drop my body in the nearby creek.