Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti had earlier stopped by the Paris apartment, the fire in him stoked anew by a passion to draw the nude figure. He attended classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, where the models held short poses. “Ugh!” Sandra wrote in reaction to this. “Who thinks that students have the genius and experience of Matisse at 70! What one needs at the beginning is to have a long, good look!!”

  Sandra’s long look often turned into a prolonged afternoon or an amorous weekend affair out of town, the former with Kitaj’s encouragement; the latter sparking one crisis after another between them despite their professed and preferred open relationship. While Robert’s visit provided an excuse for a much needed time-out, it appears Sandra appealed to him to explore his manhood with her, inspiring the fifth poem in which he writes of the “lovely / women in me.” The final lines, “softly softly wood dove / I hear the last echoes in the / well” (poem 5), conjure, in this context, the nymph Echo and her prey, Narcissus.

  Sandra’s pulse had always quickened when Robert visited. She had recently moved to Kitaj’s Kensington flat when Robert arrived as a houseguest in 1973. She raved that Robert was the most brilliant person she had ever met; his breakfast conversation exhausted her before she had her first coffee. She described him in a letter: “He wears his grandmother’s brooch at his neck instead of a tie and the long hair falling from his 54-year-old hairline is pulled back in a clip. His voice is the loudest, squeakiest and highest-pitched of any one else’s in the room. If you don’t know his work, try Roots and Branches first.” During a subsequent visit in 1977, Sandra drew Robert nude in her Sydney Street studio.

  In our setting, Paris, 1982, it was Kitaj who would draw Robert, clothed, the drawing destined for the cover of Robert’s next book of poems, Ground Work II. And Robert would write the introduction to Marco Livingstone’s forthcoming monograph on Kitaj.

  Sandra and Kitaj rented the apartment above their own for Robert—two rooms and a curtained bed in the foyer for me. Robert’s line “What do the birds say / sweeter than the water / of the friendship, amitié …” (poem 1) describes perfectly the garrulous ease of the arrangement, like birds at the bath. I wrote home, “Duncan and I come and go, we all eat lunch and supper together, take naps at the same time and read voraciously indoors (the weather is terrible). We have learned to be excited and mutually stimulating, as well as to be calm and quiet in each other’s presence. Robert poses for RB and Sand in the afternoons & ‘earns his supper.’ They want me to do the same.” For those afternoon sessions, Robert either wrote or read aloud from his poems while keeping a steady tempo with one hand, as if conducting music.

  The Paris month proved to be pivotal to our diverse futures, an account of which is beyond my scope here. Robert had a sixth sense about this: “We were / meant, all our lives, to be / here where we together are / wherever / in this change of weather” (poem 2). I interpret “change of weather” to mean the inner changes that took place. Of Paris, Robert wrote, “these / museums, these façades, / these rumors of great hours / were presented” (poem 2). Unlike the nurturing atmosphere of the apartment, the life and history of the city did not touch the clockwork of their souls.

  One external incident gave a glimpse of those inner gears, each learning something new of the other. The American poet Anne Atik and her husband, French-Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha, invited our group for dinner. Discussion hovered around the painters Domenichino and Poussin, on their application of the color red, and whether to describe their shadows as warm and cool, or as light and dark. Avigdor, a Poussin scholar, became increasingly impatient with us. The others were good-natured explainers and knew how to deflect his bite, as I did not. I suffered a withering attack. Robert gallantly came to my defense. It was an emotionally complicated, fulfilling, and unforgettable act of friendship that was also independent of friendship. The evening’s tensions, gaffes, heroics, and rivalries exposed new strains within our characters we had not yet tested against the friendships that had formed. We left early and walked in the mist along deserted Parisian streets, half drunk on Avigdor’s good wine. Passing a wall where couples kissed passionately in the street, I whined, “I haven’t been kissed so since I left California.” Robert kissed me full-on, on the lips. Sandra was shocked, not that he had kissed me, but that he had not kissed her.

  Photo of Sandra Fisher, mid-1980s.

  Robert Duncan by Sandra Fisher (detail). Color pencil on paper. Signed “for Jess with love from Robert and Sand June 1977.” Robert Duncan Papers, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York © 2016 Max Kitaj, reproduced with permission.

  Hansel, Gretel, Grendel

  Jedediah Berry and Emily Houk

  The boy walks with mud on his sneakers, kicking at skunk cabbage, slapping mosquitoes. On his T-shirt are gallows birds, fanged demons in wizard-whorl, skullheaded soldiers. He has come to the forest to scavenge parts for his monster.

  The girl’s territories are the narrow places between bog and strip mall, parking lot and train tracks. With her hood up, she is invisible. With her arms out and her palms upturned, she can feel the wind talking.

  The boy marches two clicks from the abyss, deaf to his own footsteps for the thrashing in his headphones: evil spirit, in moorland living, endured the dole in his dark abode. He collects trash-can lids, rubber tires, milk crates, tinsel from dead trees, burlap. These the bones and organs, nerves and flesh of his project, the only thing hungrier than he is.

  The boy sees teenagers in the burnt orchard by the river, cigarettes cindering orange in the gloam. Eddie and Rick, their names are, brothers with yellow hair, and haughty Marco, and quiet Larry, who likes to hurt things smaller than he. Their chief is Dan, and Dan gets signals from the fire department on the radio strapped to his belt.

  The boy will be thirteen soon, but he swears he will never be a teenager.

  The girl keeps a bone in her pocket. She touches it when she wants reassurance. It’s the bone she gave to her brother once. She found it sitting on his windowsill, collecting dust. He probably doesn’t know that she took it back.

  Brother and sister have this in common: they drop things wherever they go, often without realizing it. Trails of small white stones, torn bits of paper, candy wrappers, scraps of bread. A means to find the way back home—or whatever.

  The girl worries that one day she’ll accidentally drop the bone. That it will lead her someplace she doesn’t want to see again.

  From her perch on the water tower, she hears the hum of the electric lines, the cries of river gulls, the grinding splutter of engine brakes from semis descending the hill into town. She sees teenagers moving in packs between convenience stores and hatchbacks, parking lots and thickets. The teenagers chomp shoplifted chips and chocolate bars. They make out in backseats and under bushes. When the girl blinks three times, she can see that the teenagers don’t have shadows.

  Down by the creek, the boy scores true treasure, a big green wheelbarrow. It squelches as he draws its bulk from the mud. The bottom’s rusted out but the wheel’s still good. He trucks it rumbling over root and stone to his secret clove near the landfill.

  The monster makes from the boy’s offerings more of itself. The wheelbarrow is the top of its head, some nylon rope the tendons of its arms.

  The boy lights a candle, sticks it to a rock beside a dozen charred wicks. He sits staring into the flame and nods his head to the music, death-shadow dark, hater of men.

  The monster remains still. When the boy goes home, he follows the trail of wood chips he doesn’t remember leaving.

  “They’re doing housework,” the girl warns him at the door, and the boy groans. Housework means their father testing every electric cord in the house with his ammeter. It means the third wife cutting words from the dictionary and pasting them with their definitions to things around the house: aloe to the aloe plant and faucet to the kitchen faucet, but also stoic to her favorite mug, doubt to the curtains, trade gap
to their father’s chair.

  Their father turns the lights off and on, off and on. He says, “Does it seem dimmer in here than it used to be?”

  The girl watches her brother help himself to more mashed potatoes, more gravy. He’s been out in the woods all day, and she can smell the sour-milk smell of him. She thinks about the food going into her brother and being absorbed by his body. The more he eats, the more she can disappear. She wants her skeleton closer to the air. She wants to touch the wind with her bones.

  After dinner, the girl fetches the boy a bowl of ice cream. “Describe it to me,” she says.

  He takes a bite and says, “It’s ice cream.”

  “Describe it to me like I don’t know what ice cream is,” she says.

  He shrugs and says, “The cold hurts my teeth.”

  She adds another scoop to his bowl.

  The boy is not friendless, but his friends have all been taken: by summer camp, by a stepfather to a mountain lodge, by a job on a tugboat. The boy makes charts in preparation for their return, rolls polyhedra to test the results. Six on Divine Intervention: Key to the Haunted Realm. Fourteen on Cave Encounter: An Unnatural Spring. Eleven on Family Curse: Forgetfulness.

  The stereo he found in the woods. One of the speakers crackles, and burning smells ooze from the receiver. In the heat he conjures stats for demons and assassin-bears, for the Living Hand of the Iron God. He hopes his monster isn’t jealous. He maps forbidden caverns, another sheet for every level down. He goes deep enough to pause summer.

  Alone at night, the monster is sinew and gristle and ache of stone, a memory just out of reach, faint as a flicker of candle flame. Nightflight, sulfurous.

  It tries to speak but its growl is gone. Tries to prowl but it has no feet. Rusting scrap for ribs, vines binding, earthwarmth mixing with the coldscent of metal and tang of trash. Lovely, lovely smells.

  Down by the river, amidst the crooked black trees of the burnt orchard, the teenagers are having a party. By the fire they smoke their cigarettes and drink beer from cans, faces hot, butts cold. In pairs the teenagers go into thickets to make out, and when they return, teenagers look at teenagers with knowing looks. Dan, chief of the clan, ponders the chatter of firemen over the radio while sharpening his knife, which is very long. Like the teenagers gathered by the fire, the blade of his knife casts no shadow.

  The girl wakes to a bright buzzing crackle. From her bedroom window she watches a glow above the sidewalk go from white to blue to smoking orange—then an eye-scorching pop followed by darkness, a break in the skin of the world.

  The power is out all morning. “Transformer blew,” her father tells her, and later he’s part of the crew that lifts the new gray drum into place.

  But that word sticks with her—transformer—and so does the scar of the light’s bright lashing. From its depths seeps a warm, whispering bath of funky juju. Every word it speaks is its name, and its names are infinite.

  In the basement, the girl sorts through a shoebox of paper dolls. As a kid she cut figures from magazines—a woman running in her bathing suit, a smoking cowboy, kids holding bottles of soda. She made clothes for them: raincoat, parka, top hat, bloomers, all with folding tabs. The dolls look strange together, disproportionate each to each, a weird race of giants and dwarves.

  Now she craves their flatness. Turned sideways, the idols go unseen. They are masters of disguise, hosts to any power.

  The girl feels the ghosts of cats slink close. To them the dolls are an emptiness, inviting as cardboard boxes. The girl tempts one nearer, and the doll of a boy with a picnic basket shudders at its edges as the ghost slips inside.

  The monster’s thoughts are shouts in an empty cavern. That it has two arms is a point of confusion. It remembers torches, loud men with yellow beards. It remembers a hand on its cheek, brow pressed to its brow, skin thick with the musk of the fen. Mother.

  Now this little man, juicy attendant, hunts monster parts and binds them. A creator and a healer, but he isn’t good at what he does. He doesn’t seem to know that he hums music only he can hear.

  The monster still can’t move. It is a haunted statue, a static hunger, a vault of want.

  In September, the boy’s friends return. The boy doesn’t tell his friends about the monster, but he shows them the new charts and maps. Strangely, no one wants to play in the campaign.

  They have, the boy thinks, spoken to one another in advance. There is, he suspects, a conspiracy afoot. Rob goes to the movies with Linda, Luis with Jennifer, leaving the boy alone with his unuttered incantations.

  He remembers the one time his sister played. She’d had in her inventory an enchanted lantern. Liars standing in its light would cast two shadows.

  The boy dreams grisly deaths, dice rolling ones again and again. He returns to his monster, feeds the unused charts through its nail-lined jaws.

  The girl does her homework in the cemetery. English on the roof of a crypt, algebra by the pond under the willow.

  The third wife waves to her from the path. “Hello!” she calls. “I’ve been thinking—”

  The girl pulls her hood up, and the third wife blinks. She clutches her jacket to her throat.

  “Funny,” the third wife says, “I could have sworn.”

  The boy emerges from the woods behind the gas station. Teenagers are here, drinking from a bottle wrapped in brown paper. Before the boy can put his headphones back on, Eddie says, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” the boy says.

  “Hey,” says Eddie’s brother Rick.

  “Hey,” says Marco, gold curls shining.

  Quiet Larry says nothing, only nods to Dan, who shows the boy his knife, and gives him a lord-to-vassal look.

  “I heard you’re going to be a teenager soon,” Dan says.

  The third wife goes with her survey team down to the river. They’re siting the location for new power-line towers. She watches a sailboat nearly get crushed by a barge and thinks, Why do we bother building anything?

  Her theodolite is labeled with the word theodolite and its definition. She turns the telescope so she can peer into the burnt orchard to the north. She used to go to parties down there, back when she was a teenager. The third wife is glad she’s not a teenager anymore. It was, she thinks, like being in a horror movie for seven years. The third wife has never seen a horror movie.

  She wonders if the orchard burned in her lifetime. She wonders what started the fire. Maybe the trees just grew that way, she thinks. Maybe the fruit they bore was fire.

  The girl overhears her father and the third wife discussing ghosts.

  “Electrical disturbances, basically,” her father says.

  “I saw one in the cemetery last week,” the third wife says.

  “Our thoughts are bundles of electrical charges,” her father says. “When we die, the thoughts can get out and wander on their own.”

  “The ghost looked so much like your daughter,” the third wife says.

  “Must have been my grandmother. She was a weirdo too.”

  The girl screams, and two lightbulbs explode in the kitchen.

  Her father shrugs. “See?” he says. “Electricity.”

  In the abandoned zoo at the edge of town, the boy goes walking with the teenagers. Dan’s radio squelches and he switches it off.

  “There’s so much to explain,” Dan says to the boy. “So much about being a teenager that you still have to learn.”

  The boy wishes he were here with his sister, just the two of them. She would tell him about the ghosts of animals in their cages.

  “You know that place down by the river?” Dan says. “The burnt orchard?”

  “Scorchard,” says Eddie, and his brother Rick says, “Torchard.”

  A squirrel runs down out of a tree. It sees the teenagers and panics. Quiet Larry corners it against a wall and aims his BB gun at its head. A sharp huff and the squirrel’s head explodes.

  “Anyway,” Dan says, “you should come with us to this party on Saturday.”
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  Their father is out on a job, driving his pickup but barely watching the road, eyeing the power lines through his open window.

  His job is to tend to the giant that sleeps in the lines. To keep it from waking and throwing off its encumbrances. Siphoned through substations and transformers, the giant’s breath feeds a million small machines. The machines expect so much that the father feels an ache in his chest when he thinks about it.

  He thinks of his third wife, in league with the earth itself, her magnetism the pull that wakes him. He thinks of his second wife, the sparks that flew between her and his children, their words burning him in the crossfire. His first wife, when he remembers to think of her, is a fluttering light at the back of his children’s eyes.

  Squatting by a substation, chewing on a stalk of grass, he hears the alternating current of the giant’s breath, in and out. He rides the waves of its sleep, the better to keep it sleeping. He hears, from the deep places of its dream, a rumble like thunder underground.

  In the garage, the boy finds his father’s spare truck battery. He lugs it down to the clove, hooks it up to the monster’s head with jumper cables. He lights a candle and puts on his headphones: Of Cain awoke all that woful breed, etins and elves and evil-spirits. The boy sleeps. He dreams of a path of white stones. When he puts one of the stones in his mouth, it dissolves like bread.