An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  A FLICKER OF ANIMAL, A FLANK

  There’s a difference between leaving and abandoning a place. As in: I left Richmond, Virginia, once. After eight years, I was ready to leave for Texas. As in: then I moved back and abandoned it. Both kinds of departure may seem, from the outside (to a neighbor who doesn’t know your name, a server in the corner café), indistinguishable. Leaving is easy. You throw a bouquet of spatulas and wooden spoons in the extra two inches of room in a box packed with novels. You tape the seam shut. You mark the calendar. You circle the exact date. There’s a more nuanced art to navigating the layers of abandonment. To renounce, reject, disown, desert, forsake, or to quit a place, it has to have wounded you the way a person can.

  Maybe I prefer the word quit to abandon. I like the verb’s tragicomic, cowgirlish edge, its sassy monosyllable. As in: moving to a one-bedroom apartment in a lavender Victorian on the grounds of an old riverside cemetery just after a breakup was a bad idea. I quit the bay windows and floor-length red drapes. I quit the wraparound porch. I quit the antique rocker I thought I saw bob by itself next to my bed at night. I quit the weekday whirr of the groundskeeper’s lawnmower buzzing the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “abandon” derives from the Old French abandoner. The word comes from the Latin ad (“to, at”) and bannus (“control”). The verb’s original sense meant the exact opposite of its current definition. Abandon used to mean to “bring under control.” Later, it became “give in to the control of, surrender to.”

  I surrender eight years, four apartments, two college degrees, a tree-thronged street named Cherry, my old potter’s smock, one brick row house painted eggshell blue, one lone white crepe myrtle in the backyard and its faux snow. I surrender one slow opaque Virginia river named for an English king, James. I surrender the yellow-painted head shop on Grace and its spiced wall of clove cigarettes, fragrant in their black papers. I surrender my usual order: veggie sausage, egg, and cheddar on a kaiser. I surrender, like Robert E. Lee, whose bronze statue is rooted in the grass roundabout on Monument Avenue, the cars moving in circles at his conquered feet. In winter, the weak sunlight shines on the general’s southward-tipped face instead of the creased ass cheeks of his horse, Traveller. Why did we ever stop calling people horse’s ass? As in: I was a real horse’s ass to cheat on my former boyfriend, who was a good man. As in: my friend was a horse’s ass for ratting me out. For judging me, doubling my losses. When did abandon pivot, like a cast figure come to life or an old friend, furious, turning to face that exact opposite direction?

  The abandoned zoo, called “The Old Zoo,” in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, is a ghost town: quiet, acute, hypnotic with graffiti. It was built in 1912 and closed in 1966, the animals shipped off, relocated. I visit the site with my husband. A sandy, briar-edged trail winds through a labyrinth of vacant animal grottos, man-made caves, and empty iron cages with their ochre-tinged doors hanging open. Almost every structure’s swaddled in chain link, the fences torqued and perforated with wire cutters to create thorny birch-leaf–shaped doors. A repeated graffiti tag says PAST, in sweeping all-capital letters: blue over stone, red over desert cliff, red over dented-tin wall of a metal house (of reptiles? small mammals?). I pose for a photograph, crouched inside a person-sized birdcage, and poke my fingers through the spindly crosshatched wires. I snap some shots from within a square enclosure (for wildcats? gorillas?), its wrist-thick iron bars blotting long strips from the weeping silver-dollar eucalyptus. In my peripheral vision, I keep thinking I see a flicker of animal, a flank. I take a whole series of close-ups of lumpy, archaic keyholes, the rusted-hazel spaces of the cages behind them empty except for the ancient ivy’s helix threatening to break through. On a hill, we watch a professional photographer pace the sepia stubble in front of his subject and see the ivory pleats of a black-haired girl’s airy quinceañera dress weave alternating tiers of shadow and light.

  The tattoo artist who gave me a tour of his apartment on the grounds of the graveyard in Richmond, which I rented for a month and then abandoned, called himself Captain Morgan, like the Jamaican rum named for the Welsh pirate. He had spiky blond hair and dense sleeves of greenish ink covering his shoulders, forearms, hands, knuckles, and neck. Captain Morgan was about to leave his one-bedroom on the first floor of the former groundskeeper’s house to move farther south and open a new tattoo boutique. At the time, I felt like a captain, too: that grizzled seafarer from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner cursed with the compulsion to repeat his story of a haunted voyage over and over again, to anyone who would listen. Captain Morgan listened to me, though, with empathy and patience. Over brunch and mimosas that simmered in our noses as we sipped, he told me a few anecdotes of his own. He’d recently reunited with an old girlfriend from art school and planned to follow her to Nashville. He recalled several of the most memorable designs he’d given people (a hand tattoo of a woman biting a ball gag, a half-sleeve depicting the Wicked Witch of the West, a small wing behind the ear of a Croatian occultist). He also told me about the time he visited the two-room shack in Tupelo where Elvis was born.

  Before we parted, Captain Morgan led me to a burled fiddleback armoire stationed in the bedroom that he said came with the apartment, since the piece was solid walnut and much too heavy to move. It had been left behind by a previous tenant, and by the one before that. Captain Morgan opened the armoire’s French doors and raised what looked like the bottom plank of the interior closet to reveal a secret storage compartment lined with plum-colored velvet. Weeks later, after I’d moved in, I peeked into the armoire’s hidden chamber to find a present Captain Morgan had stashed there for me: a large hardcover art book I’d admired on his coffee table, a collection of Alberto Vargas’s vintage illustrations of pinups, voluptuous and leggy and often nude except for a pair of black sling-backs or a shouldered mink stole. As a tattoo artist, Captain Morgan had etched a number of naked Vargas-like ladies onto the rippling biceps of men (and women, too, he said), who’d flex and bring the twitching figures to life. My two favorite Vargas illustrations date from the early 1920s and feature ethereally pale, dark-haired women with jagged flapper bobs poised in fantastic settings. In Dragonfly (1922), a nude woman turns her sleek, marbled back to the viewer, two transparent, eye-spotted insect wings socketed to her shoulder blades. As she leans to sniff a white rose, her hefty cone-shaped left breast dips its nipple into a lower blossom. In Nita Naldi (1923), the silent film actress—naked except for a gold rope choker, dangling earrings, snake bracelet, and oval obsidian ring—drapes her elegant arms around a marble bust of Pan. Naldi’s bold, kohl-lined gaze catches the viewer’s directly, while the goat-horned god grins impishly into her temple. Her warm flesh tones brighten next to the sculpture’s cold stone. As I flipped through the pages, the women seemed to pulse and multiply in my silent apartment, stretched on chaise lounges or peering over bare shoulders or clutching ruffled parasols with slender fingers, their tips polished red.

  Vargas drew the two nude flappers during the time the Old Zoo bustled with visitors wearing similar Jazz Age haircuts, when the place was musky with the scent of oily bears and the fermented tang of sweet hay matted in the dung of elephants. More than ninety years later I mistake the muggy, urinous scent for the funk of animals, but instantly realize the unlikeliness that the original odor could have lingered for so long. Teenagers must’ve gotten drunk and peed on the graffitied walls and mossy corners. But I’d read in the New Yorker about a treasure-hunting diver who found the ruins of a pirate ship at the bottom of the sea. He disturbed a layer of silt above the wreck and recognized the unmistakable stench of piss, the scent by then three centuries old.

  When I look at the book Captain Morgan placed in the antique armoire I remember a kindness I deeply needed, a camaraderie offered by a stranger who’d taken a pirate’s name. I knew Captain Morgan for maybe an hour, yet his gifts to me have meant everything: his patience, his stories, his sly offering waiting
within our shared space. I left Richmond once, I abandoned it once, and when I return to it now, I return as a visitor. Sometimes it feels like a ruin and other times I brush up against the layered populations and faint aromas of ghosts: my old selves, former friends, vanished lovers. They wander the wisteria-flaked alleys, scattered with lavender, as the cracks in the brick below give way to another century’s cobblestones. Then surrender to another’s. Sometimes the cracks feel that deep, that close.

  PANGAEA FOR ALICE

  The wisteria vine that winds up my deck’s trellis spirals clockwise in California, advancing its thick, linear timeline. It knots with my nostalgia each time I think of my old life on the opposite coast. Its motion reminds me I can’t go back to Richmond, Virginia.

  Weak and not self-supporting, Virginia wisteria climbs iron fences, wooden trellises, telephone poles, cable wires, nineteenth-century gravestones, lampposts, balconies, carriage houses, roofs, and garages in a counterclockwise swirl, hurling itself backward—against time—toward the city’s older core. The vines twist through Richmond’s cobblestone alleys mosaicked in grey ovals—those smooth, turkey-egg–shaped stones paved before the Civil War. They drape the green, Victorian grounds of Maymont—Major James H. Dooley’s Gilded Age estate—thatching a lavender ceiling for the Italian Garden’s marble pergola and spiraling its ivory columns. They stipple their violet impasto behind the legend of Edgar rumored to ghost the street near Poe’s Pub on East Main, his broad forehead creased as if considering the tangle of slow vines—Monet’s night terror.

  Flamboyant as a drag queen’s wig, wild as a psychedelic grapevine, wisteria was named by the botanist Thomas Nuttall after Caspar Wistar, an eighteenth-century white-haired Quaker. Wistar—a Philadelphia physician, paleontologist, and professor of anatomy—taught for over thirty years at the University of Pennsylvania. A popular academic, Wistar enlivened his lectures with colorful teaching aids, some of which included ghoulish anatomical models comprised of actual human organs and limbs, which he’d dried and injected with wax. Outside of the classroom, Wistar hosted weekly salons for local and visiting intellectuals known as “Wistar parties” in which guests, such as the French botanist François Andre Michaux and the Portuguese diplomat and naturalist, the Abbé Corrêa da Serra, discussed politics, art, science, and philosophy. “The company met,” recalled the physician Charles Caldwell, “without ceremony, on a stated evening, where in the midst of a succession of suitable refreshments, the time passed away, oftentimes until a late hour, in agreeable, varied, and instructive discourse.” Wistar also founded the Society for Circulating the Benefit of Vaccination. He belonged to the Humane Society, the Pennsylvania Prison Society, the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York, and the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the latter of which he become president in 1813. In 1791 Wistar had bought and freed a slave “to extricate him from that degraded Situation.”

  Richmond braids in its fraught layers the degradation of Manchester Docks, that former port in the downriver slave trade, as well as the eclectic hum of Virginia Commonwealth University, the diverse arts-centered school that unites the old pawn shops and new foodie restaurants of downtown with the genteel bay windows and crepe myrtled courtyards of the Fan District, the narrow row houses and mossy cemetery of Oregon Hill, and the drywall-shuttered windows and torn chain link of Jackson Ward. I went to art school as an undergraduate at VCU, stooped over a pottery wheel most nights in the ceramics studio on Broad Street as I mouthed the words to Grateful Dead songs blasting from the Discman in my smock’s front pocket. Each time I rose from the wheel to rinse my clay-covered arms in the industrial sink, wider than two side-by-side bathtubs, I passed my reflection in the panoramic black windows of the studio, my torso lit and climbing with the city’s lights. After my art degree, I earned my MFA in creative writing at VCU; and all through those eight years in the city, I’d take shortcuts to campus, winding my way through the cobblestone alleys.

  The word “shortcut,” though, may be misleading. An alley in Richmond won’t let you scramble to get to class. Try and rush and you’ll twist your ankle in the gaping pit of a missing cobblestone or stub a couple of vertebrae as you stomp on the dome of an irregular pebble and compress the bones of your lower spine. I chose the erratic routes for their baroque tangles of foliage: those dazzling violet hedges of wisteria that warped—big as willows—over brick walls, snowing their flakes of lavender between the cobbles’ cracks. For the way the alleys slowed everything down.

  Only an aging greyhound slows down. The gaunt beasts that race around the dog tracks near Houston can reach over forty miles per hour. The animals sprint counterclockwise on the circular track, chasing a mechanical decoy rabbit that zips ahead of them on a raised parallel rail, powered by an electric motor. I’ve tried at least three times to write a poem in which the figure of Lewis Carroll’s Alice slips from the bleachers at a Texas greyhound racing track, enchanted by the whirring speed of the plastic white rabbit. As she stands in the center of the arena, the stampeding dogs swirl around her. Their rapid counterclockwise movements kick up a dry, umber dust, spiraling her back into the past. In my version of Wonderland, Alice morphs into a trippy, cowgirlish time traveler among the fried gulf shrimp and drunken cheers and skeletal dogs, their brindled fur blurring to one smooth shade of red. Each time I try to write this poem, Alice slips deeper into the center of the teeming track, back into the past, without me.

  As far as I know, wisteria won’t grow in Houston, a place hostile to many species of plants as well as types of people. The shrub’s rumored to spring up in the moist forests near the wide state’s eastern swamps, though I’ve never seen the evidence. I lived in Houston for three and a half years while earning my doctorate, dragging my then-boyfriend, Carrick, from Virginia with me. We used to hike the Texas trails beside the sulfurous white oak swamps and algaed bayous, eager to see flashes of will-o’-the-wisp through the trees, sparked from the water’s occasional lisps of methane. Instead we once startled a herd of javelina gathered at the edge of a shallow finger lake at twilight and ducked, squealing, behind the trunk of a live oak as the bristled animals charged by, snorting and tossing their hoglike snouts. Of course, Houston had its share of beguiling flora: the loose impressionistic crepe myrtles; the barbed gold tongues of hibiscus; the looming droop-necked sunflowers as tall as bookcases; the bulbous-tipped tulip trees that were all fuchsia-striped white petals—to hell with any green leaves. But I had no use for highways lit with neon crosses, for top-heavy Spanish moss, for sliced brisket that barbecued my fingerprints with its frottage of vinegar.

  The first time I met my undergraduate poetry teacher, Lee, who became my long-term mentor and one of my closest friends in Richmond, he rushed into class ten minutes late wearing a black leather jacket, brown beard, and air of subversive authority that suited a man whose telephone had been tapped by the FBI during the early 1970s for antiwar activism and whose elaborate yarn-spinning in the classroom reminded us that he’d abandoned his plan to attend the Catholic seminary to become a poet. Poetry is the supreme fiction, Lee told us, quoting Wallace Stevens. Don’t cede any damn territory to fiction writers, he preached, pushing our allegiance as novice writers away from fact and toward imagination. The gospel according to Lee, we said. Amen.

  Lee took seriously my beginner’s poems, his meticulous comments—blue pen, all caps—filling the negative space. He pulled books from his shelves or printed copies of poems from his computer, read them aloud, and taught me how to talk and think about poetry. Two hours would slip by, as I sat, fixed to my chair, by turns laughing and annotating poems. Other times we’d pick up Carrick and hike the trails in Pocahontas State Park or drive to Sugar Hollow or cross the suspension footbridge over the James River to get to Belle Isle. Often the three of us would meet at 821 Café on Cary Street, the narrow punk-rock diner next door to an abandoned brick bakery with a graffito bust of the late poet Larry Levis spray-painted on its front door, behind a punctured wire scree
n that flapped in the wind like grey veil. In the portrait, Levis had thick furrowed brows, a furtive sideways glance, and a bushy mustache that resembled that of an earlier poet who once lived and wrote in Richmond: Edgar Allan Poe. During one of our first meetings, Lee taught me Levis’s poem “Slow Child with a Book of Birds” in which a “slow child” on a bus shows the speaker a picture of a snowy egret in a guide book, mispronouncing the bird’s name as “No Regrets.” The poem veers back and forth through history, swirling together Samuel Taylor Coleridge as he witnesses two American sailors torture a pelican on board a ship; François Villon admiring the carnivorous ardor of crows pecking out the eyes of thieves lashed to a scaffold; and a woman “slipping her black tank top off without a word” at a party, who then “whispers the nonsense / of ‘Wooly Bully’” in the speaker’s ear. At the end of the poem, Levis zooms in with cinematic precision on the naïve child’s junk food–occluded grin and then telescopes outward again:

  No regrets, some food still stuck

  Between his teeth in his off-white, foolish,

  Endless grin, that unrelenting music

  That makes all things a scattering & wheeling

  Once again, the black seeds thrown out onto

  The snow & window squealing shut just after—

  The sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense.

  In 1793, the same year the yellow fever epidemic blazed through the state, Caspar Wistar joined the staff of the Pennsylvania Hospital. While helping his close friend and colleague Benjamin Rush fight the epidemic, Wistar himself contracted the disease, became seriously ill, and nearly died. Wistar and Rush clashed over approaches to treating yellow fever, and their opposing beliefs about bleeding and purging finally ended their friendship.