by Lee Upton
When I opened the closet door I saw the lighthouse and the empty bottle. The bottle’s paper clouds were shattered into confetti. And far back against the closet wall the clay mermaid was propped. Her face looked grated.
Glynnis’s voice came from behind me. “Everything will dry out.”
I couldn’t stop myself from shuddering as I turned around.
Glynnis went on, “There were spots where the paint was too thin and so those parts have to dry. And I was making you new clouds. I was going to surprise you.”
When I didn’t respond she said, “I don’t steal. I’m just fixing this for you. It’ll be better than ever. Nothing taken. I don’t take things. I’m not the one who steals things. This was supposed to be a surprise.”
It is a surprise, I was thinking. Everything is a surprise.
At last I was able to ask, “How long have you been in this room?”
“I’ve always loved this room. Why not fix the bottle here? I didn’t mean to scare you. This room is—soothing to me. This is where Conor and I went after he almost drowned. Dewey didn’t try to save him. Afterwards my mother brought us up here and left us. She was screaming at Dewey downstairs while we were up here. But here the screaming was muffled. And Conor and I were safe.”
I could almost imagine the scene, although Glynnis must have misunderstood what happened. My uncle would never have wanted to harm anyone. “Does Conor believe my uncle wanted him to drown?”
“We’ve never talked about it. But I saw. People have always tried to hurt Conor. People tried to hurt Conor and blame him for what happened to Anita, but it wasn’t his fault. She was always nervous. She let everything scare her.”
I pointed to the closet where orange dust powdered the floor. I asked what she had done to the mermaid’s face.
“I wanted to change the face. It’s my face Anita used. Anita was obsessed with my face. I changed this one to be like your face.”
Glynnis pulled back the bed’s coverlet. From under a pillow she drew a photograph album. “I’ve been keeping this here—so no one sees. Yet. It’s not done. But if you look at it even at this point you’ll see something you should know about—about your uncle.”
I didn’t want to look at her photographs.
The cover of the album was black, a mock crocodile skin, the fabric greasy under my palms.
Glynnis said, “The photos—you’ll see. I photographed everything Dewey did.” She nodded at the album. “It’s almost full. You can see. You should see it.”
I had to will myself to open the album.
Page after page: photographs of stranger’s faces, eyes closed. A pale yellow nipple. More women, their naked bodies melted-looking and flat. My uncle’s face was there, almost out of the picture—but it was his face. And probably his hand, the white cuff of his shirt.
In the next photograph glass shattered around a woman’s body, the pavement glinting, wet-looking. And then I was the woman in the photograph, and above me the world was stunned with light.
The close-up of the face—my own face. Fluid trickled, dark against my mouth.
And then I realized it was Anita Ellemenz’s face. The edge of the photograph: a gleam, like a watermark. Across it sprayed flecks of white.
I was still looking at the photograph when Glynnis’s footsteps clattered down the stairs. I could hear the back door close.
Another photograph: Anita Ellemenz, her face underwater. In the corner of the photograph, blurred: a circle. A drain. The reflection of a white gate.
The shock of seeing the photographs—shock overrode my reason. Even so, after a while I could tell that the women in the photographs were not real, the colors and proportions off. Each like a scene from a dream in which everything is out of scale. An arm was superimposed. My uncle’s arm. His face wasn’t right either. The proportions didn’t match the rest of the scene.
The images were Photoshopped.
Even so, I couldn’t stop gasping for breath. The photograph of Anita in the water. The reflection. Her image was superimposed on what appeared to be the swimming pool at the house.
I couldn’t know what Glynnis had feared more: that I would not stop loving my uncle in memory, or that I would never leave the house that she loved almost as much as I did. I did know that I wasn’t the weak person she imagined. But then, for years I hadn’t been the person I imagined I was either.
The developer who bought the house and property I inherited paid a good price. But he was not able to find the necessary backing after the house was bulldozed.
I called Ana Su before I left town. We have so much in common that we couldn’t stop talking for hours. I told her about selling the house. Even as we talked I felt stabs of sadness but also something like relief.
Now in my imagination the property fills with tall thistles, shaking their armor. Because the land has been neglected, more weeds set in—milkweed and broadleaf plantain. The lot is like an untended grave, a grave of black weeds. Nothing passes through the yard, except for drunks staggering out of the tavern. Where the plum trees once stood the ground looks charred and glitters with broken glass. And where there aren’t weeds there are deep tracks from bulldozers.
The story that my grandparents managed to make me overhear years ago at last struck me as true: my uncle had accepted their bribe. He had been on the cusp of taking on a ready-made family. Taking care of me would have been difficult then. Everything must have begun to shatter that last year I lived with him. It wasn’t only my shyness that kept me away from those children who were always around the house. It was fear, even though I couldn’t have said what I was afraid of. My inheritance might have been a way for my uncle to assuage his guilt, his guilt for giving away, against her wishes, his sister’s child.
The house that I loved, the freedom I loved, my uncle: no longer can I see them even in my imagination in the light I knew from childhood. Even so—and for me there is always an “even so,” or a “just the same”—when I think of the selling price of the house and how I’m no longer in debt I feel enormously grateful to my uncle. I feel comforted, too, when I imagine the plot of land as if it’s a riverbed that has dried up, and yet a place where a breeze scatters pollen freely.
Before I left I boxed everything from the room my uncle had kept as a shrine. I knew Glynnis had not triumphed—even if she had long ago wanted to replace me, that she had always longed to wreck any claim I had on the house and on my uncle. What she guessed about my feelings for Conor had something to do with it all too.
Ana Su keeps telling me that I did the right thing—that it wasn’t revenge so much as good sense. Although I would be entitled to revenge, she says. She confessed over the phone that the summer after I left she got inside my uncle’s house and looked around for me as if I had to be hiding there somehow, as if it was a lie that I had ever left.
She promised that next summer we’ll take a trip together. We haven’t figured out where we’re going. She’s bringing both her daughters.
The Last Satyr
The satyr apologized to whatever powers cast him into the human world as the last of his kind. He apologized for despoiling, yanking, mewling. For adopting the language and mannerisms of every woman he touristed, for “shedding on the camp bed,” for “sundry pharmaceutical trips.” For his preference for the wives of easily dissatisfied men.
It was on the curdling skin of the swimming pool that he caught sight of the future—his gruesome hairy face out of which his eyes winced. He told himself he did not want to know why at some future moment he was wincing. The water flashed and sparkled and the future disappeared, filling instantly with the reflection of a diving board.
In the last half hour no one had so much as wetted a fingertip in the swimming pool. The people who were here earlier had set their drinks on glass tabletops. They let the early evening spill around them and stared into the pool where aspen leaves drifted onto the surface and spun. They never knew he crouched in the shrubbery. Eventually, they crumpled their
cocktail napkins and pushed back their metal chairs and left.
Fortunately, the remains of their drinks had not been collected. The satyr tossed down two fruit slushes, more ice than rum, and a daiquiri that had been held between the forefinger and thumb of an executive assistant with a fever. Before he lurched onto a reclining chair, he could feel the contours of the thin lips of the woman who sipped from the rim of a scotch.
Shadows and light drifted from a window in a building past the walkway. A woman stood on the other side of the window, inside the building. She had to be looking through reflections—the reflection of the room behind her cast in the window, the further reflection of the glass tables surrounding the satyr at poolside.
Then she did something astonishing that startled the satyr into pure panicked wakefulness. She waved. The window banded with new shadows, and she stepped back.
The satyr clambered off his chair, hustling to the shrubs near the side of the pool farthest from the building. His thighs soon ached from crouching. When he was satisfied that the woman would not appear, he edged out and stumbled to a reclining chair.
The expulsion of breath beside him nearly caused him to reel out of his chair.
“Hey, boy,” a woman’s voice said. “I can hardly watch them anymore. Can you?”
Her expectancy corkscrewed into him. There it was—that human pressure, as if they couldn’t leave anything alone, nor could they see what he actually was. “The pace people keep. They dance like weevils.” She raised her chin in the direction of the window. “Look at them. People are never more revealing than when they dance. Not that I can dance anymore, but at least I acknowledge my limitations.”
The satyr nodded. He wondered if in the darkness he could pass for an unusually hairy, hunch-backed man.
The woman stared at him so intensely that he feared she might become alarmed and scream. He could see it: men would barrel out of the building. Already he could feel their fists digging out clumps of his flesh. If they knocked his head against the table his jaw would snap. Blood would well from the corners of his eyes.
Every hair on his ancient body was as sensitive as a cat’s whisker. The old injury to his knee woke up, and the satyr groaned.
“My feelings exactly,” the woman said. “I was sick to my stomach and in bed all day. For a while I felt like running away from my own stomach. Then I was fine at 8:30 tonight. Just like that. This is my retirement gift—this trip. They gave me a party last month. You start to realize that your funeral will be like your retirement party: the same people thinking they’ve got something on you just by surviving.”
The sound of a piano being played floated in from the restaurant. “You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat you when you can no longer hurt them,” she said. “I guess it was all my fault. I worked in Personnel. In the end there was hardly anyone I hadn’t hired.”
She patted her thigh and stared at the satyr as if she expected him to scoot over close to her. “Chester. At my retirement party he recited Yeats. ‘That is no country for old men,’ he said. He meant, This is no company for old women. This is not your company, Louise. Then he went on about ‘those dying generations.’ And then ‘an aged man is but a paltry thing.’ Die, I thought, you can die now, Chester, you bastard. We’re waiting. And then it came: ‘a dying animal’—and he meant me.”
Somewhere, a door opened and closed.
“You never know what uses you’ll be put to,” the woman was saying. “Even Yeats. What a marvel Yeats was. But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. And oh yes: There is not a fool can call me friend, and I may dine at journey’s end with Landor and with Donne. You hear lines like that and it’s easy to remember what a randy bugger he was.”
The wind came up and died instantly. The smell of chlorine crept into the satyr’s nose. The woman whispered to herself. Gradually her voice grew audible. “I let him have his moment of fun. He thinks he’s the only one alive who’s ever read a book. I could have recited my Frost imitation and directed it at him: Whose accounts these are I think I know. He keeps a cheap whore in a bungalow. Even a halfwit, say, an accountant, must think it queer—the way he keeps so much in arrears. Two accounts diverge and I—I’ve made copies of every one of his files—and that will make all the difference.”
A breeze passed across the wet stubble around the satyr’s lips, and he let himself think about women he had known. The more fragile the woman, the more her dreams led her life for her, sprouting city parks and luxury resorts and residential complexes. Such women were like nymphs. Except that nymphs are in disguise permanently, drawing themselves into tree bark, into lavender, into clover. If you were lucky, a nymph materialized. Even then, even as marbled tissue, in another second she was as hollow as a reed. At the most licentious gatherings—rose petals and oils, fat dribbled into the open cavities of corpses, at those ceremonies in which human men degraded bodies—nymphs stood apart. Suddenly he saw the face of the woman before him as if it were swept underwater, a surprised face disappearing, at the exact moment she was caught. Yes, he could have known her. That might be what her problem was.
Being here, the woman was saying, made her think of that cruise with Les, before being tugged back into port. Who could tell when either of them wasn’t drunk? They were out on “the high seas,” as Les said, where everything dipped and swelled. Back home in the condominium, a new widow only a week later, she felt it again: a rocking in her body, as if the sea were lodged permanently in her blood.
She was talking so quietly that he tilted his head to hear her. Oh no, she was saying, she never guessed her life without Les would be like drowning perpetually. And no one saw her, no one noticed. If they could see her suffering what would they do? Nothing. Everyone suffered. So what? She was lucky. Very lucky. Everyone just wanted her to retire. The barbarians gave her a party. And what holds her heart together? Les—they don’t make them like that anymore. “The end of a line,” she said.
The satyr didn’t think the woman would ever stop talking when abruptly she patted the top of his head before he could pull away. Standing, she lost her balance and grasped at the wadded fur of his shoulder blades with her feeble, half-hollow hand. “Even so,” she said. “Even so. I hate my own self-pity. You’re almost a comfort to me, you almost are.” She sighed. “Do you belong to anyone?” She felt around his neck. He twisted away from her. “Be a good boy and let me check if you have a collar. All right. Have it your way.”
On the walkway past the pool the woman turned and cried out, “You’re a good boy. Yes, you are.”
When she was out of sight, the satyr rested his head on the glass tabletop.
It was she who touched his shoulder. He hadn’t meant for it to happen. How could he be blamed? His gift to a dying woman was a restless heart.
He walked to the edge of the pool, kicking away a pair of flip-flops. A white towel was coiled on the cement. Someone had swum in the pool today for almost forty minutes. In his mind he saw her—a scar on her thigh. Her cell phone rang on one of the glass tables on the other side of the pool. She dropped her towel on her way to answer it.
He looked into the water and closed his eyes, then opened them again. The image he had seen in the pool before the old woman came out was his own reflection—now. It was himself, his shadow reflected by torchlights at the pool’s edge. Rippling across the length of the pool, like a dolphin coming toward him, was the future.
The satyr saw everything that would happen, saw himself scratching at the old woman’s door until she let him in. Saw himself climb up onto the bed to match his breathing to hers. As if he were hovering close to the ceiling of the hotel room, he saw the woman’s mouth fall open. Her brown-veined arm was flung across the animal lying beside her on the bed. In the morning the woman from housekeeping would find the woman and her dog. The unmistakable stillness.
It was inscribed in fate, in an ancient light, by the gods no one anym
ore could see, although their kind, unlike his own, would never grow extinct, those gods who would allow him what they never needed to worry about for themselves.
Among them were gods of love. And they would not let him die alone.
Bashful
Shana was in her bathtub when her arm brushed across her right breast and she felt the lump. A nearly perfect circle. She didn’t tell Rachel what happened. She didn’t tell how the air grew cold and—it was too theatrical to be believed—a dark wing passed over her. Through the doctors’ visits and even later, Shana was submerged under the memory of that wing, cold and wrinkling, like a bat wing.
The results came back negative. She was relieved that the signal was the wrong signal, but there was a residual sensation she couldn’t make go away. She tried to explain it to herself as an inevitable aftermath. She knew she should be grateful, but instead she often felt the bat wing cross her forehead again, and then she was lost and crying.
Eventually Shana told her friend Rachel about the false alarm, but not about the ridiculous wing. The two women worked together at the city’s cultural center. Rachel was the oldest in a family of five, which gave her a sixth sense for weakness. It was Rachel who proposed that she and Shana take a vacation together. Shana had no one to turn to, after all. Shana had never even had a serious boyfriend after her divorce. Besides, Rachel didn’t like to vacation alone. She was settling down after her own divorce, and her siblings weren’t in crises at the moment. There seemed nothing more compelling to Rachel than getting Shana back to the land of the living by going down to Orlando.