by Lee Upton
Julia was thinking about going for a walk on the grounds of the hall when a stream of whiteness rushed toward her. It was Anise, who laughed and grabbed Julia’s arm and cried, “Isn’t this fun? I should have gotten married a long time ago! You too, Julia!”
But that’s not what Julia heard her friend say. Instead, she heard: “Everyone knew. Isn’t it funny? A long time ago. Poor you, Julia!”
Julia’s throat closed as Anise kept on. “Do you remember that time we jumped into that swimming pool?” When Julia wasn’t able to respond, Anise said, “Why did we do that? Oh, I remember. We were possessed.” They had jumped into an unattended hotel pool on a school outing to the state capitol. Anise lied and told the teachers they fell in.
“We just wanted attention,” Anise said. “We didn’t get any.” She patted the stomach of her wedding gown. “I feel like an onion in this.” To Anise she didn’t look like an onion at all, but as if she had been swallowed by a giant white predator that left only her head and wrists visible until she was almost entirely digested.
Julia said, “Your mother told me you made—stones.”
“She told you? Oh. I can imagine what she told you.”
“She didn’t tell me much, really.”
“Stones. It can’t sound interesting.”
“I’m very interested.”
“It’s not so much about what they look like. It’s how they feel when you touch them. I like the way the clay responds. I can go out in the morning and they’re wet. Or in the summer in the afternoon they’re warm, baked. Plus, they don’t do anything. But sit there and take the heat. I admire that. At any rate, I find that kind of wonderful.”
“Could I buy one?”
“I’ll give you one. They’re great to hold. You know what my mother says about my stones? She says, ‘I’ll give you this. They look authentic. But honey, they’re just fake stones.’”
The sounds from the wedding reception faded behind Julia. The shadows of pines mingled. Birches from fifteen years ago leaned in upon one another. The earth was brittle with a lingering frost crust. Julia would have to be careful to avoid the thawed spots where her heels could sink.
She stepped into a patch of darkness, regretting that she hadn’t bothered to return to the cloak room for her coat. The wind against her face, the smell of the pines, the gravel under her heels—all remained achingly familiar. When she was a teenager Julia ran along this path to escape from a boy who had been a friend of her brother. It had been a summer night following an afternoon of thundershowers.
In earlier years, she and Anise used to catch minnows in the stream and watch them swirl in jars. They fished for bullheads and brought them up the road in a bucket, dumping their catch in a horse tank brimming with rainwater. One by one, after days, despite a diet of oatmeal, the fish floated to the top of the tank. Even long after she was forbidden to, Julia came to the stream with Anise. They made their way to the bridge where they might be rewarded with the sight of a muskrat. After crossing the bridge they had a choice: to stay on the road that curved into town or to take the road straight, where the tar ran out. Often they chose the gravel road with its two abandoned houses and a cemetery. In spring the ditches sent up May apples and bloodroot, later quenched in milkweed. In late summer the air grew thick with the bitter smell of new grapes and elderberries. All year long the oaks and the maples were clotted with wild vines.
She was coming close to the stream. A flood must have raided the banks. Trees looked ready to topple, bald roots glowing. A white patch of old snow gripped the end of the path. Beneath each fresh welling-up from the stream, deeper sounds churned.
A shudder went through the gravel at her feet. Pebbles sprayed. The bank sloped under her feet and Julia slid. By the time she caught herself she was kneeling, and the air pulsed with a scorched odor, like plastic burning on a stove.
A wall of whiteness rustled forward. She could hear breathing and then, amazingly, a swan’s neck curved and swung close to her forehead. The feathers smelled like old sweat caught in a pillow. She sensed that the swan’s feathers would prickle like nettles if they brushed against her.
“What are you going to do?” a voice asked. “Come on, Julia. Everybody knows you’re a liar.”
The swan’s wings lifted and lowered until the air fanned like smoke.
Julia looked through her fingers. The swan’s eyes shone yellow with black slots at the centers. The hissing grew into a rasp.
“Don’t pretend I’m not here,” the swan said. “Bow to the swan king!”
When Julia wouldn’t move or answer, the bird wheezed, “There’s something under my wing. Help me. Help me. You can.”
The swan dipped its beak under its wing. With difficulty, the beak tugged and then, at last, wrenched free.
“Help me,” the swan pleaded. Its head began to hang like a blow-up toy leaking air.
Julia made herself reach out. She felt under the feathers, chilled as packed snow. Her fingers cramped. When she pulled her hands away, her fingers were covered with slivers of watery ice, gray feathers, and flecks of blood.
“Look,” the swan said, its breath skimming her ear. “Look. You’re bleeding.”
It was then that Julia flailed her arms and beat at the swan, beat and kicked until the body peeled away and the finest cold white particles fled through the air.
Gray feathery down slid over her fingertips. She brushed her hands over pebbles, but the feathers were sticky, and then, with panic, she stood and stumbled away, half-crouched. She did not look behind herself as she scuttled back in the direction of lights and music.
Julia’s heart roared, as if whatever had happened—a blood clot bursting and overwhelming her with a million ragged constellations, a seizure that swung up and through her brain, the nervous breakdown that she had been courting for years—whatever it was could not obliterate her after all.
Over the parking lot hung new snow, like powder blown off a snow bank, suspended in the beams of the lights above the parking lot. The parish hall was illuminated a frosted blue.
At the entrance to the cloak room she stood before the mirror for a long time. The front of her dress looked black where it was wet.
When she turned around, her heart slowed at the sight of lilies floating like white gel lights on the tables. The wedding cake was plundered level to level like a ruined castle—but what a lovely castle. A bridesmaid leaned against a pillar and held hands with a little boy wearing an ivory-colored suit. At the wedding party’s table, where candles flickered, the groom in his white tuxedo stared into the center of the hall.
And there on the shining dance floor Anise’s father was spinning with his daughter, his hands lost in her dress. The two didn’t look separate at all, but like one creature half-sunk in froth. Anise must be tired, must be dancing to please her father. For who can say no to a father? Who can stop a father? Not Julia’s poor brother.
It was then that Julia began to make her way to Anise. She didn’t know what she was about to do—except that she wanted to strip the arms of Anise’s father from Anise. And then, when she was about to reach the pair, Julia skidded toward her friend and her friend’s father—both of whom saw her sliding in time to catch her.
They were laughing as she stumbled into their arms, laughing because she looked hilarious: Julia, self-effacing and kind, so clumsy, skidding over in her funny high heels, Julia who had no one. They felt more than a little guilty about Julia, not quite knowing if they could spare the life energy for her—Julia, who must have spilled a drink or two on her dress and who seemed as baffling as ever. But neither Anise nor her father knew why on this happy day they should have felt the startling change, why tears came to their eyes even as they were laughing—Anise holding her friend and her father putting his arms around both young women and swaying to the quartet’s version of some song the father didn’t recognize, the father who vowed, vowed twice more, that he’d do something for Julia, his daughter’s goofy little friend from all thos
e years ago. Standing like this, with his arms around both girls, he vowed that right off he ought to give a donation to the church to fix the damn floor beneath them, treacherous as ice. No wonder Julia slid.
He called his wife over—waved to her and she came, half-skidding herself, to take Julia away. Because somehow his wife knew, always, what to do. Never missed a beat. Saw the big picture. Saw something—although sometimes what she saw—well, it was too late by the time she saw, but at least she saw. He had Julia’s hand in his own now, her hot hand, slippery. His wife would help bring this girl down from a wine high, would get her back to normal if anyone could.
Julia, beginning to recover, felt her own breathing slow again as if she could read Anise’s father’s thoughts. It was clear to her—how could she have thought otherwise, even for a moment—that he was a decent man, and because he was a decent man, he could not imagine his way into the past.
And so Julia knew she was alone. It was left to her to be the one who must try hard to hold to goodness, to Anise’s goodness, to Anise’s mother’s goodness, and to Anise’s father’s goodness, to hold to them, to imagine in their direction, toward them, toward their innocence, to hold close to those who never had been, and never would be, visited by the swan king.
La Belle Dame Sans Professeur
Many years ago I asked one of my professors at a restaurant—I’d slept with him—if he could buy me something to eat. I was passing through the restaurant to see if I knew anyone there who could help me. For about two-and-a-half days I hadn’t eaten anything but popcorn. There were three other professors with my professor, which made things worse, and in my memory the restaurant was loud and dimly lit and my professor was hunched over a plate. As soon as I asked him, my professor said No.
He repeated himself.
Then he said Scat. The way you talk to a cat.
Don’t you hate humility? he used to say in class, and I tried to understand what he meant by that. I took notes that looked like this:
Humility = Boring.
Very boring.
Infinitely boring.
Low energy masquerading as virtue.
False modesty = everything mediocre people hope
to be accused of.
Adultery isn’t any fun, my professor told me in private, unless it’s like a very involved practical joke. He said that at a certain point the wife in our example suspects something, and then the game becomes more rudimentary. Nevertheless, the wife must count to four million before she admits what she knows. Until then she walks around blindfolded and thinks the furniture keeps moving.
He taught literature. Of course.
Under his influence I began to admire Keats, even though he had reservations about Keats. We were here, he said, to conduct, he said, an interrogation. Keats’s poems are about breathing, my professor said. Keats was coughing blood while he wrote those lines. He was more aware of breath than any of you will ever be, my professor said. Keats could have been a far more remarkable presence, my professor said, but his early death inhibited his fullest and most dynamic realizations as well as his interrogation of the cultural position he occupied. My professor didn’t entirely like Yeats either. Keats. Yeats. They merge, he told us, into Yeast.
Remember the Vikings? my professor asked me, using a peculiar sing-song voice. It was after my fifth class session with him, after Keats had been grilled for the most extensive period. (Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Pretty—even gorgeous—but a dead end. Part of the problem with the Romantic sensibility, my professor said.) Chalk streaked the front of my professor’s jeans. (I work in the chalk mines, he liked to say. I’m in danger of chalk lung, he liked to say.) That day after he asked me about the Vikings he said, What did the Vikings have that you don’t have? Confidence!
A week later I was on assignment for the entertainment section of the college newspaper and walked in on Joe Cocker in the Plymouth Stadium dressing room. One of the band members was wearing tight blue briefs. It was embarrassing, but after the band members stopped shouting they nodded at me in a good-natured, almost courtly way. And then Joe Cocker came out from somewhere and shook my hand. I took out my pad and pen and asked him questions (who was your greatest influence? what are your future plans?) and was amazed at how much he looked like my professor—as if he never slept through the night once in his entire life. His eyes were red as if from a permanent case of conjunctivitis.
I told my professor about his resemblance to Joe Cocker and he said, You can’t be right. You will never meet anyone like me.
You ought to develop an imagination, he said. Start small. At least lie a little. Lying is a start. Just don’t lie to me. Remember this: Great liars in history, they’re countless. Tacticians, strategists, managers of any land beyond the size of an acre. Liars, all of them.
In class he turned out the lights and narrated a slide show. Aldous Huxley. Virginia Woolf. D. H. Lawrence. Hilda Doolittle. Virginia Woolf again, looking like a beautiful ferret and wearing around her neck what appeared to be an actual ferret. At one point I wasn’t watching the slides but resting my head on my desk. Suddenly the class gasped like one mammoth lung sucking in air. I lifted my head. On the screen was a slide of my professor, staring at the camera, wearing absolutely nothing, in front of a cottage said to have been inhabited by Katherine Mansfield.
He gave me a photograph not long after that. The whole time I held the photograph I could feel his eyes sliding over the side of my face.
The photograph was taken by someone looking down at a woman—leaning over a railing, most likely. A blue and gold blanket appears melted underneath the woman. But the woman in the photograph isn’t relaxing on the blanket. She seems stunned, her knees drawn up to her chest, her hands at her ankles pulling herself inward. She is trying to take up as little space as possible in the lens. It had to be his wife.
Keep it, he said. It’s yours, he said. Photography is my avocation.
I knew even then that as soon as I got back to my room I would tear the photograph of his wife into bits, as if that would absolve me of the crime of seeing her like that. But when I held the photograph with my professor staring at me I didn’t tell him about what I planned to do. Instead I said, This is powerful.
One night before he had to drive home to grade papers my professor said, Tell me a little about yourself. Go ahead. I’m listening. Help me avoid fulfilling my obligations.
I told him about Texas, land of the armadillo, my home state. The armadillo is the dirt bag of the natural world, I said.
I told him I was raised by people who collected people. In the end my adopted parents wound up with twenty-four kids and almost got on the cover of Ladies Home Journal. Throughout my entire childhood I was only allowed to wear yellow socks—to make sorting laundry possible. We had three deep freezers in the basement. The woman pretending to be our mother hung a pair of her own pantyhose on the outdoor faucet. Stuffed with bars of Ivory soap for us to wash with. She wouldn’t drain the water from a pot of noodles—she was so afraid of losing nutrients. If any of my family saw me now they would call me disgraced.
Is that so? he said. They must be the salt of the earth. They’d be pretty shocked, huh? Good. Shock is good.
I didn’t tell him that I actually just had one sibling—a brother, and both my parents were alive and well in Havre de Grace. All that stuff about being adopted—it started as a joke meant to make my life sound interesting. It would take me a while to understand that I could have told him I was raised by polar bears or ocelots or Capuchin monks and he wouldn’t have found my life interesting.
By the fountain, the day after he told me at the restaurant to scat, I saw my professor. We were outside the library and the fountain was turned off. It looked like a giant cement dog dish. My professor trotted up, sending dry leaves scattering off the path, his coat flapping. There was a nip in the air. It was past time for mellow fruitfulness. The hills behind my professor’s head looked scalped.
When my professor
opened his mouth, a little spout of a cloud puffed out. Are you still hungry? he asked. The space under his nose lengthened, and I couldn’t figure it out. Then I understood: he was trying to make his face leer. It was an almost convincing leer—a self-conscious leer. As if it had all been a joke, as if I was playing a trick on him when I passed through the restaurant and stopped at his table, as if my hunger had been metaphorical.
When I didn’t say anything, he said, You’re a cute kid, but we’ve got to stop this.
I know, I said. La Belle Dame Sans Professeur, I said, groaning at my own joke. I couldn’t stop myself. I said, My hair is long, my foot is light, my eyes are wild. And then I said, I guess you’re not going to find me roots of relish sweet or honey wild or manna dew.
He looked at me as if he didn’t recognize I was ruining Keats.
I tried again with more Keats. No birds sing, I said.
My professor looked away. I was sure he didn’t recognize Keats’s words. As if he didn’t read Keats for the words. Then my professor said, Take somebody else’s seminar next semester. It doesn’t look right. Your being in any of my classes. Not good.
I asked him why he cared about how things looked.
He laughed and said, Guess what? I quit smoking. He clapped his hands together.
Again? I said. I could see my breath hanging between us.
Cigarettes and speed—who needs both? he said. I pulled my head back so he couldn’t tap my forehead. See you later, my professor said, his coat flapping behind him when he took off.