10
The Mask
He is lying on his own examining table, resting his eyes. The telephone buzzes quietly but Mrs. Quintana, his receptionist, has given up the battle with insurance forms and gone home.
He places his long hands over his face, the fingertips lightly touching his forehead, thumbs resting on the maxillary bones beneath his eyes. His office in the hospital basement is cool even in this late-September heat, and pleasant in winter as well. As practical and comforting as a cave. The lack of windows has never been a problem; artificial lighting is adequate. He has just examined his last patient of the day, a sixteen-year-old with six small gold rings piercing the cartilage of her left ear. She is expecting twins. They will be born small, and in trouble. There was no reason to tell her everything.
He imagines the procedure by which the tiny gold wires were inserted through flesh and spongy bone. It would have to be painful. He is mystified. Children devote slavish attention to these things, but can’t be bothered with prophylactics.
He drifts between wakefulness and sleep, thinking of Codi. Her eyes are downturned and secretive, her heart clearly hardened against him already, to have done this. Her hair is in her eyes. She flips it sideways, chewing the inside of her lip and looking out the window when he talks to her. She’d wanted pierced ears at thirteen; he’d explained that self-mutilation was preposterous and archaic. Now they discuss shoes. He wants to ask, “Do you know what you have inside you? Does your sister know?” Hallie is young to understand reproductive matters but it’s impossible that she wouldn’t know, they’re so much of a single mind, and he is outside of it completely. He has no idea what he can say.
She’s in the fifth or sixth month, from the look of her, although Codi was always too thin and now is dangerously thin, and so skillful at disguising it with her clothes he can only tell by other signs. The deepened pigmentation under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose, for one thing, is identical to the mask of pregnancy Alice wore both times, first with Codi, then with Hallie. It stuns him. He feels a sharp pain in his spleen when he looks across the breakfast table each morning and sees this: his wife’s face. The ghost of their happiest time returned to inhabit the miserable body of their child. He can’t help feeling he has damaged them all, just by linking them together. His family is a web of women dead and alive, with himself at the center like a spider, driven by different instincts. He lies mute, hearing only in the tactile way that a spider hears, touching the threads of the web with long extended fingertips and listening. Listening for trapped life.
COSIMA
11
A River on the Moon
Loyd and I didn’t go to Whiteriver. He was called out on Friday for a seven-day stand on a switch engine in Lordsburg. He seemed disappointed and promised we’d go another time. Loyd didn’t have much seniority on the railroad; he’d only moved back to Grace a few years earlier, and at Southern Pacific he was still getting what he called “bumped” a lot. It was hard to plan his time off.
I was somewhat relieved. I’d been unsure of what I was getting into, and had my doubts. Once I found out, I had more.
I’d asked J.T. what “game birds” were. He and I were out working in the old plum orchard one evening, pruning dead branches out of the trees. My job was mainly to stay out of the way of falling timber. It was a fair distance from the house, and Emelina had asked if I could go along to keep an eye on him. She wasn’t the type to worry, but a man hanging from the treetops wielding a chainsaw is a nerve-racking sight, believe me. Even if he isn’t your husband.
J.T. informed me that game birds were fighting cocks. He was taking a break just then, leaning on one hand against a tree trunk and drinking what seemed like gallons of water.
I was stunned. “You mean like cockfights.”
J.T. smiled. “You been talking to Loyd?”
“He invited me to go with him up to Whiteriver. He said something about game birds, and…” I laughed at myself. “I don’t know, I was thinking of something you’d eat. Cornish hens.”
He laughed too. He offered me the jar of water and I drank from it before handing it back. I was surprised at the easy intimacy I felt with J.T. We hadn’t been friends in high school—he was, after all, captain of the football team. Through no meanness on his part, but simply because of the natural laws of adolescent segregation, we might as well have gone to high school on different planets. Being neighbors again now brought back what we’d forgotten then: we had a relationship that dated back even before Emelina. We were next-door neighbors in toddlerhood. We’d played together before male and female had meaning.
He turned up the glass jar and drank it to the bottom, tensing the muscles in his jaw when he swallowed. J.T.’s whole body shone with sweat. I briefly imagined him naked, which disturbed me. I’d slept with someone’s husband before—an Asian history professor in college—mistaking his marital status for something comforting and fatherly. But I was devoted to Emelina. No, that wouldn’t happen.
It was early October, and still hot. Grace was supposed to have the perfect climate, like Camelot or Hawaii, and it’s true that growing up here I could hardly remember an uncomfortable day, temperature-wise. Most of the homes had neither air-conditioning nor central heating, and didn’t need them, but this fall had turned into hell warmed over. Down in the desert, in Tucson, every day was in the hundred-and-teens and the TV weathermen were reporting the string of broken records almost proudly, like scores in a new sport. In Grace no one kept track especially, but we suffered just the same.
J.T. knelt down to start the chainsaw again, but I spoke up before he could yank the cord. “I thought cockfighting was illegal.”
“Most everywhere it is, but not in the state of Arizona. And up on the reservation they’ve got their own laws. Loyd’s not a criminal, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I guess I don’t know what I’m asking. I just can’t see Loyd and cockfighting.”
“His daddy was real big in the sport. He was kind of a legend up there in Apache country.”
“So Loyd’s got to keep up the tradition,” I said, without sympathy. I knew Loyd’s father was also a renowned drunk.
J.T. asked, “You an animal lover?”
“Not to extremes,” I said. “I eat them.” I thought of how unmoved I’d been watching Emelina chop off heads for our Sunday dinner, that first day in Grace. “But watching animals kill each other for sport,” I said tentatively, “that’s kind of an unsavory business, isn’t it?” I looked toward the edge of the orchard. It was getting dark fast. Already I could see moonlight reflected in the irrigation ditches.
J.T. sat on his heels and looked straight up into the branches over our heads. “I don’t know why I mess with these trees,” he said. “They’re sixty years old. They don’t produce worth a damn anymore. I could cut them down and get a lot better out of this ground, not to mention the firewood. But my daddy gave me this orchard.” He picked up the stone of a plum, weathered shiny white like a tooth, and rubbed it with his thumb. After a minute he raised his arm with a quick overhand snap and threw it toward the river. “Loyd’s old man didn’t have one damn thing to give him but cockfighting.” J.T. looked at me. “I’m not crazy about it either. Codi. But you’ve got to know Loyd before you decide.”
I dropped the subject of cockfighting. Loyd had begun to come by fairly regularly in the evenings, which is to say regular for a railroad man: I’d see him three days in a row, and then not at all for a week. It reinforced the feeling that we were only casual acquaintances, meeting nearly by accident, and I tried to limit my expectations to the point where I paid no attention to how I looked in the evenings. Sometimes as I walked around the brick floors of my living room and bedroom I’d realize I was listening for the jingle of Jack’s tags, and then I’d click on the radio.
When Loyd did show up we would drag our lawn chairs out for a view of the sun’s parting shot at the canyon wall, and we’d talk about nothing in particular. F
or instance, he told me the story of Jack’s life. Jack’s mother was a coyote that Loyd took in when he was living up on the Apache reservation. She’d been crippled with buckshot in her shoulder, and had gone into heat. Loyd saw her one night skirting the arroyo behind his house, trying to get away from a pack of males. He got her attention with a low whistle, and then he left his front door open and went to bed; next morning, she was curled up under his cot.
I didn’t question this. For one thing, he seemed to hold a power over females of all types. But truly Loyd had the most unself-conscious way of telling a story I’d ever heard, as if it didn’t matter whether I was impressed or not, he was just going to give me the facts. It seemed as if he didn’t care enough, one way or the other, to lie.
“I kept her shut up in the house for a week with my dad’s old dog, Gunner. Gunner lost one of his back legs when he was a pup and he could get around real good, but he’d never in his life mounted a female. I thought she’d be safe with him.”
This matter-of-fact talk about heat and mounting made me slightly edgy, or rather, edgy once-removed. I felt like I ought to be uneasy with Loyd, but I wasn’t. To him it was life and death and dogs. Sometimes Loyd seemed about twelve.
“Well, Jack is here to tell the tale,” I said. “So I guess she wasn’t safe.”
Loyd smiled. “Nope. Old Gunner had his one chance at love. He got into some poisoned coyote bait right after that. He died before the pups were born.”
“How do you know they were his? She could have been pregnant already.”
Loyd asked Jack, as politely as you’d ask a favor from a friend, to roll over. “See that?” Over Jack’s heart was a white patch with a black crescent moon in its center. “That’s Gunner’s. There were seven pups, two black and five brown, and every one of them had that badge.”
“How did you know which one to keep?”
He hesitated. “Dad decided,” he said finally. “And Jack. Really I guess Jack’s the one that decided.”
They were nothing electrifying, these chats with Loyd in the dark, but they were a relief from my days at the high school, which were spent in a standoff just shy of open war. Occasionally Loyd took the tips of my fingers and rubbed them absentmindedly between his own, the way he would surely stroke Jack, if Jack had fingers. The night of the story of Jack, he also kissed me before he left, and I was surprised by how I responded. Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of in spite of the Surgeon General’s warning. Later on, when I slept, I had dreams of coyotes in heat.
I also saw Hallie. Her hair moved around her like something alive. “I’ve kissed a man who kills birds,” I confessed, but she looked past me as if she didn’t have a sister. Her eyes were pale as marbles. I woke up confused, too shaken to get up and turn on a light.
I’d dreamt of Carlo, too, on several occasions, for no good reason I could see. He’d written me a letter that was fairly medical and devoid of passion. He did miss me, though, and that sentiment brought comfort as I lay in my empty bed. It meant I was lonely by choice, or by difficult circumstances such as an ailing father; these things are supposed to feel better than being lonely because nobody wants you. Lately I’d started thinking about Carlo with a kind of romantic wistfulness, which I knew was bogus. The truth is, we’d essentially promised each other from the beginning that we wouldn’t stay together. “No strings,” we said, proving that we were mature medical students without spare time. The odd thing is that we did stay together, physically, and so I suppose falling out of love was our hearts’ way of keeping the bargain. The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.
Especially there. Carlo and I had gone to bed together for the first time one early dawn during our rotation in pediatric intensive care, after we’d worked all night trying to save a Papago baby brought in too late from the reservation. We’d gone straight from the dead baby to my apartment, my bed. There was hardly any talk that I remembered, we just held on to each other, joined, for as long as our bodies could stand it. I wanted anything that would stop that pain, and Carlo was strong medicine. Not happiness, nothing joyful, only medicine.
There was one other time of desperate, feverish connection that I particularly remembered. This was much later, when Carlo and I were living abroad. Carlo had been granted the opportunity to spend a year in an unbelievably remote clinic, halfway up the tallest mountain in central Crete.
The work was rugged, but in December we took a trip away from the village, to Venice. The clinic closed for some combination of clan ritual and Greek Orthodox holiday that practically evacuated the village. We set off for Italy feeling like truant school kids, drinking wine in tin cups on the train and reeling with the heady sense of getting away with something. Before that he’d scarcely managed an afternoon off, much less a week. Then Carlo came down with a cold on the overnight ferry to Brindisi, and by the time we reached Venice we were both burning up, our skin hot to the touch, like furnaces. Our bodies’ internal combustion gave rise to an unquenchable craving for carbohydrates, and for each other, so we checked into the Penzione Meraviglioso and for a week ate plates of pasta and made a kind of sweaty, delirious love previously unknown to either of us, in a bed that was memorably soft and huge.
The Penzione looked out onto the cold, damp Grand Canal and a dim little plaza ominously named the Piazza of the Distraught Widows. (Distraught or Inconvenienced, it could translate either way.) The origin of this name was unknown to the elderly matron, who was born and raised in the building. She brought food up to us and was alternately scandalized by our appetites and worried for our well-being. She was of the opinion that in damp weather any illness at all would find its way to the lungs. She ventured to tell us we ought to see a doctor.
Carlo spoke Italian. His father had come to America on a steamer carrying cured leather and Chianti. He explained in grammatically imperfect but polite terms that we were both doctors. We could not be in better hands, he said. For my benefit, later, he’d translated the double entendre. By the end of the week, Carlo and the matron were bosom friends. In spite of his notorious shyness, whenever she brought us hot tea he would sit up in bed with a shirt on and give opinions on the infertility of her eldest daughter and the lung ailment of her son-in-law who worked in the glassblowing trade. I lay beside him, meanwhile, with the sheets pulled around my neck, feeling sinful and out of place, like a whore taken home to meet Mother. The matron didn’t ask for my opinions, probably because she didn’t believe I was actually a doctor. Which I wasn’t, technically. I did some work at the clinic—rural Crete was not overly concerned about licensure—but to be completely honest, I was Carlo’s paramour. I did the shopping. I learned the Greek words for oil and soap and bread.
I know that a woman’s ambitions aren’t supposed to fall and rise and veer off course this way, like some poor bird caught in a storm. All I can say is, at one of the many junctures in my life when I had to sink or swim, Crete was an island, a place to head for, new and far away. I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I’d discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way. I learned all this while a baby was trying to be born feet first. I couldn’t think how I was going to tell Doc Homer, and I’ll admit I was attracted just then to the idea of putting an ocean between myself and that obelisk of disapproval. It also helped that Carlo really wanted me to go with him. But I had no mission beyond personal survival; it was nothing like Hallie’s going to Nicaragua. Our village had its own kind of bleakness, the bones and stones of poverty, but the landscape was breathtaking. Our classmates were treating intestinal parasites in Niger and Haiti, black lung in Appalachia, while Carlo and I set broken legs on the steep slope of Mount Ida, mythical birthplace of Zeus. Poverty in a beautiful place seemed not so much oppressive as sublime. Basically it’s the stuff of the world’s great religions, I told myself, although I
knew better.
It was 100 degrees in the shade, and the burgeoning minds of Biology I and II took a field trip to the river; our putative goal was to get some samples of water to examine under the microscope. We were learning about the plant and animal kingdoms, starting right down at the bottom of the ladder with the protozoans and the blue-green algae. I could easily have collected a gallon of river water myself and brought it in, but the school had no air conditioning and I’m not completely without a heart. I’d played it tough with the kids long enough to prove my point, if there was one, and I was tired of it. We all were.
I knew the trip to the river would turn into a party. I didn’t try too hard to go against nature. The tall kid with the skinhead haircut, whose name was Raymo, was the first one to get wet up to his T-shirt. It took about ninety seconds. I only drew the line when boys started throwing in girls against their will.
“Okay, knock it off, scientists, Marta says she doesn’t want to get wet,” I said. Marta shot me a lipstick-red pout when they put her down, but she’d shrieked “No” and I felt there was a lesson to be learned here, all the way around.
“I’ve got a ton of sample bottles here, so let’s get going.” I sat a safe distance up the riverbank under an ash tree, labeling full bottles as they were brought to me. I’d suggested that they collect shallow and deep water, moving and stagnant, but they went far beyond this, collecting anything that moved. It was enough to make you believe in the hunting instinct. There was a low, grassy island in the middle of the riffle, and several kids were out there on their knees catching bugs and frogs. Raymo actually caught a six-inch perch with a net fashioned from his T-shirt. “Sooner or later I figure we’ll get around to fish,” he said. “A fish is an animal, right?”
“Right,” I said, and let him dump it, along with the frogs, into a mop bucket we’d cajoled from the janitor. I don’t know what teaching in a big-city school is like, but at Grace High we were flexible about interdepartmental appropriations.
Animal Dreams Page 10