Just inside the door to her frame shop was one of those old-fashioned coat racks, one of the wooden ones with the sensuous arched hooks at the top curving out like dryads teasing fire. He stared at this memory for a long time. Where had this ended up? Was it in the house in Alaska? Alaska, he repeated. The word tasted sweet, like honey. What did it mean?
He maintained that he was the only one that ever used this coat rack and so why have it?
“So you can use it,” she retorted, annoyed. He hung his coat on it with a nod. He moved behind the counter and stood over her. The tools and implements of trapping moments were about her. She never explained to him where she’d learned it all and it never occurred to him to ask. He assumed, correctly, that the dead relative who had bequeathed her the business had shown her once, but she never told him this. Her little store was popular, she told him without looking up, because she made all her own frames herself, too. This was what she was doing now. “See?” She stepped back to let him look. She had formed a right angle with two pieces of wood she’d just finished with. She tapped the squarish thing the angle met upon. A joiner, she explained. She tucked him in behind her and, putting her thin little white hands over his giant rough ones, marionetted him into using it.
Her mother said, “Maggie—how artistic she was!” She must not have known the niceties of framing, for, as Maggie explained to him the process she undertook to make the thing whole, he was taken aback. How creative she is! Two years they’d been together and he’d never had an inkling of this, never would, really, he confessed later, but she worked right from the raw wood, sanding it down, notching it, putting simple details in it, staining the wood, then finally assembling it. And she did it all by herself. She never hired anyone else to help her. He did, from time-to-time, especially during these first few years when what you think is love dictates obligatory devotion to whatever passes for components of the other’s personality and interests. Had she been a schoolteacher he would’ve helped her grade homework. Had she been a serial murderess he would’ve held down the victims. But eventually, you wander off in search of a new red pen or a fresh blade for the hacksaw and you never come back. So it goes. It was his work, he told himself, working night duty that put paid to his assistance to her. She never seemed to care, only ever infrequently asking for his help moving equipment or rearranging stock, tasks she couldn’t manage alone. He also enjoyed hanging out there with her because it was the only place in the world, during these early years, anyway, that she didn’t get high at.
The first time he’d kissed her had been right where they stood. Frames, she’d been saying, were like clapping your hands around a butterfly, a necessary ensnaring of beautiful things. Like paintings, he’d replied and then before she could recoil he leaned through the massive frame and kissed her roughly. Her lips were scalding hot. She ducked her head down and away quickly, but he hadn’t missed that hum she’d made. She wiped her hand across her mouth.
“Painting is stupid,” she’d observed for no reason whatsoever.
“Then why do you run a frame shop?”
“Good question,” she’d frowned, “most people don’t frame art. S’just people. They frame people.”
Now they were married. “The angles have to be precise. No surprises,” she shook a finger at him. He watched her assemble the thing, fit the backing into it. “Perfect. The edges and the back are totally flush.” She held it up for him to see. “And you got a frame.” It was like supplying faith but not the god. Let others fill ‘em.
Surprise, the father. He’d stopped by the frame shop today to bring his new wife home safely. It was snowing and so some captured moments won a few more days of freedom with nature’s collusion. Just so happened this was the same day her father manifested at the counter while they put smiles on each other’s faces, inching towards the door that led to the back room where, he suggested, they could be totally flush. They jumped back together when the old version of her appeared on a sudden.
He had yet to meet his father-in-law. He had not been at their wedding earlier in the year. Sickness was all in in him and it kept him from travelling just then. He’d once heard Maggie’s brother, a more literate type, say that their father was “fraught with illness”. He’d be dead within a year. Everybody knew that. Every so often Maggie or her brother would make noises about driving down country to see ‘im but these were half-hearted compassions and the son-in-law could never figure why. The poor father seemed to figure in anyone’s equations hardly at all. He’d met Maggie’s brother often, since they lived a scant twenty minutes from them across town, and from the siblings’ fragmentary patches of fatherhood they occasionally turned out reluctantly, he assumed there was something dark lurking in the shadows of the family tree, abuse or alcoholism, maybe. They were rednecks at base, he reminded himself, a nefarious lot in his estimation. He equated such people as low as their former possessions.
But no, he figured wrong. There was nothing sinister here. The father was little more than a specter, really, a kind of hollow, barely necessary presence. Superfluity was only avoided by the obligations that his seed had amalgamated them with. There was nothing negative about the guy. But there was little of anything to him. He’d expected his wife’s father to be some splotchy, coarse, loud-mouthed asshole. Instead, as Maggie put it after he’d left, “You just forget he’s there. Like for your life. We used to say how easy it’d be for mom to forget he was there in bed and bring someone in with her if she wanted, never knowin’—“
“Did she?” he couldn’t help asking, seeking clues to the enigma of the forgettable man.
“God, no,” she laughed. Her mother, who she resembled not a lick, was an imaginary, pious creature. She looked so much like him, so did her brother. Same pale red hair, short and thin. The father, like the brother was balding on top. Maggie shocked him by rushing to this diminutive male version of herself and embracing him tenderly. He shook hands with his new son-in-law, apologizing profusely for missing their wedding. He was of the type whose eyes made roundabouts around one’s face, hesitating on one’s mouth, chin, never eye to eye, though. Textbook timid, he thought. Maggie’s brother was waiting in the car outside, had driven the father up for a surprise visit just under the snowstorm creeping northeast.
Her father’s wastrelry made him appear much older than he actually was, a corpse out of step with death. He’d never been able to countenance old people. It felt like one was following a funeral just being around them.
“I always said, Maggie was so bad at smilin’,” he winked at his daughter, “like she’s got peas under her eyelids. Naw, she’s a real good girl, she’s a real good girl,” and he patted her hand like he knew he’d die soon, which he, of course, did.
He always talked about other people, never himself, but he did so at a far remove from the spheres of others’ existence. He was a distant observer of orbits, well above the elliptical, unaffected and unaffecting, Maggie likened him to a weather satellite: always pointing out the obvious and utterly unconnected to events on the ground. “He don’t get wet,” she swore.
Her father swore, too, just differently: “Watch your step, learn from the get-go to look down, stay in line—steps.” His credo, his oath. Her father had been a simple corporate yes-man, a form-holder, a form-pusher for a middling-sized southern concern called Donner Bone. “Don’t you go gettin’ shot, now, either,” he nervously laughed at his law-enforcing son-in-law.
But how else would he have gotten to Weatherhead?
(38 Across) I am the Solstice’s Equinox.
And, the ruler of Weatherhead took up the pitch and tone of the high voice, I will also tell you a dream. But first,
He sat broken, bruised, and content against the broken wall that lined one of Weatherhead’s deadfalls, a once-park full of dead ash trees that faced an odd wooden house, the first he’d seen amidst the sickly grey concrete, an odd wooden house tied down to the ground as if it were a hot-air balloon, tentative, an odd wooden house held capti
ve by something other than gravity. He listened to the creak of these ropes and watched the structure sway back and forth. What had she said as they sat and he pointed it out? That its great claws had been broken out of its wooden hands? I only keep it about, she smiled, because it sings to me, that house. Yes, it sings: a kind of low hum, the hum of a god about the edges of town, a shabby, penniless god, stealing chickens and well-water. I worry after this god. I leave bread for it, tucked into paper hats that no one else knows how to make. And she pushed up her sleeves and he saw deep slashes in her forearms and the backs of her hands. I get closer and closer to it every time, but it still won’t let me pet it. No one else knows about the strange house, they can’t see it. I keep it pressed to my breast like a—like a—
Flower? He’d never memorized Maggie Mechaine, but he could sight-read her from a mile away. Weatherhead was a dyslexic assassin.
He listened to the goddamn city groan and sigh. It was troubled today, he thought, but not out of fear. He met her eyes and nodded. Go ahead. But his mind was elsewhere, for in those nearby days, after the Fall of the Break, his thoughts had turned more and more to what she’d called the last law in Weatherhead, that old close-corpse in the hospital, but he dared not ask outright. She was in her murderer’s funk again. She’d brought him low the previous evening, beaten him senseless, made up brand new fresh races for him to be and fresh racisms against him, and committed every atrocity of the fist she could think of against his skull and bones. She had dislocated him. Not a bone or a shoulder or a jaw, but his entire self, holehearted, thrown out of conjunction with the momentum of her violence, and he’d just started laughing, blood a fuzz on his lips, the joy condensing across his face invented for the occasion conducted upwards through her fingers knotted in his unkempt, tangled hair, the fingers to the hand slamming his face into the street, the hand to the bare arm and its adorable wrath and she’d paused then and he felt the jolt of her slight smile, the same one he’d always known, the smile that stole into the room, the smile that knew the tenderness in the ceremony of their violence, the smile that knew that, somehow or other, they were safe for the moment. So she stopped her pummeling of him and dragged him the way the scud of the cloud drags weather back to her sanctum where she made him a crude bed in a corner of the garage. And so he slept there with her nearby, her chin resting on the edge of the bed of her truck.
He hadn’t mentioned the museum, yet, because he just assumed that, like everything in Weatherhead, it’d been hers and she had known all along. Now he wasn’t so sure. Didn’t she know about these fools versus her? She had said she did that day at the café where she worked part-time, eavesdropping on all the coup-coup birds of Weatherhead. And surely she knew, knew of his role, of the sullen midnight promise made to Death to deliver her over yet again. And yet, he’d desecrated the museum, dumped all its puzzles and deaths into one box, shook it, and handed it back to Sir Burn and his coterie of half-women and never-suckled beasts. How saccharine was his promise then? And why? Why rebel against the rebellion, strike the strike?
Their eyes got tangled up together just then, broke his thoughts. There was a kind of Turin shroud, minus the cloth, beneath her, the way she pressed herself against the day that day, the way she spread out like blood across everything, an imprint onto this desolate, dark world. She was all full of suppose-shes, what-ifs, and did -hes, and maybe even one or two why-would-hes? She was so beautiful, less a corpse than a shout against all throats, the ones we bury in our arms, our huddles. She could’ve been a martyr to anything that day, he thought, especially him. And what was it—that way her hair imitated the arousal of howling blood—was the sky getting lighter—
She closed her eyes, but still kept her face turned to him, as she told him her dream: Two men enter the house in which I am asleep to counter the demonurgist who keeps stealing monsters out of my past and setting them at odds with me during my waking hours.
Wait, he raised a big hand, and her eyelashes snarled at him, is the stealing monsters thing part of the dream?
No, she replied, her eyes opened full like husband-and-wife executioners removing their hoods and went on without elaboration, two men enter the house, one carries a noose, the other an easel. They are both you.
He swallowed. In a grave’s voice, he cautioned, You didn’t swing. A breeze cautioned them in return and the ropes on the lonely wooden house across the way groaned and girdled.
She nodded and went on, These yous have ruptured my sleep and I curve my body this way and that around the corners of the doors and I find false indentations everywhere, bitemarks and teethpunches on every frame, but no one in the House of Vigil keeps mouths like that anymore since it was long forbidden for berserker, beast, and whore alike to keep the ferocious taciturn, against their natures. I am alone, then, surrounded by the scars left by fangs and Those Yous have survived, from the evidence of yourtheir footfalls, nothing past myme door has destroyed themyou, none of myI magics.
Now, Imy have put a thousand villages to the whip, stolen milks and cardboards and seams from the swollen and the cut and the woven, what was I to be in the face of yourtheir rape of my threshold? But I’ll tell you, stranger, in this dream, I am afraid. Afraid because once I reach the househeart, that one spot where all the shutters, whether closed or open, are hidden by corners, where every part of the house is unseen, the singular place where space plays a trick and all appears wall, my slip has become a hull and the house a ship rocking back and forth and my scream the sails and my hair the wind and one of you creeps towards me and the other behind me steals distance away from between us and I can see now, that’s not a noose anymore youhe’s wrapping around hisyour hand, yes, it’s a waltz, and that easel, yes, that’s still an easel but youhe’s setting it up and with nocturnal’s pinch, a hair is plucked off my head and added to the brush and the other ties the waltz around my ankles, one, then the other and there’s enough give-and-take to allow me to walk or dance. And then I see where I am:
They leaned forward as one, to touch their eyes to the witness of the other’s, but she wouldn’t open hers. She continued, Caught there like an outcry, I am reduced to a smear and a dance. What if the Thousand-of-Mine(this is what the people of Weatherhead call themselves) came, unconquered, and could see me this way? Disarmed. Disheveled. Disheeled. Diseviled. Disdeviled. Caught in the mirage, caught in the sun, caught in the caul over the moon, caught being born, caught dying, caught loved—
She was breathing fast. It dogged him that he’d never really paid attention to her breathing before. He was a selfish sleeper, he confessed. The longest shortest moment is the same right there, right there where day touches night and there’s a microscopic moment when both are one, equal—if you could look at night and day through a microscope—do you know this device?—I have one somewhere here—oh?—if you could look at that moment where one becomes the other, what would you see? I’ll tell you: you’d see the bleed, the part-of-the-lips, the turn-a-page, the needle’s need, that spot where edge becomes all elsewhere, like our door? The door and its whisper, remember? There is a place where the edge and the edge cease to be and together they become something else, where air meets air, an occlusion, the put-brush onto the paper, he calls me wine-hair, trapped in the other’s dance, the put-stomp of my feet, and then I realize that I’m not even there anymore, I’m somewhere else, I thought I was between—I thought I’d drowned in the edge, see? That’s what I thought all along—in the edge, in that place before the cold undermines the warmth, the place where paint and paper meet, toe to floor—but it’s not me. It’s you. I was never in that house. I never woke up. I never wore a white silken slip made out of spider’s webs. There is an encounter there in that hallway. Death becomes a dance and the threat of immortality becomes an absurd summer’s day by a lake painting each other out of light.
It was called a Lite-Brite, he whispered. His tears were too fatigued too fall, but they lurked about the fingernails of his eyes like grime or soot stuck under, we used
a Lite-Brite to make each other’s faces.
She seemed to have not heard or wouldn’t. And, preys be, that’s my dream. She drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. The long and the short of it. Finally she looked at him. She was close enough for him to see her shattered eyes. All this talk of houses raises my lusts, lusts of firing homes and vandalisms. She stretched. Did you ever paint graffiti on your dead-wife? Did she? She parted her lips slightly and touched her tongue to her teeth where he knew her ark-art lay, just behind her bite. Mmmmm, let’s go burn something down, you and me. A pity there’re no more families in the city, I’d love to throw one out in the street, dance around—
Stop, he snarled. But her eyes flashed yes-blue and she leaned her head back as far as she could and laughed and there was there a syzygy, yeah, that’s the word, he thought, her chin up, foreground to the tip of her long, skinny nose, and the troubled place between her eyes all lined up perfectly in that moment and beyond it, the sky, where, damned if it wasn’t, was that a poke of blue—
You great fool, she teased, staring straight up, mine’s an opera mouth today! I feel—simpler. I’m—what’s the turn of the word?—joking. A knife flashed in her hand, then immediately wilted. This thing dies if it doesn’t get spurt. She frowned.
He rocked back and forth, hugging his knees. He had never been more profoundly disturbed. He had her in memory’s thrall, didn’t he? Was she remembering? Evil eased off of her. I think—I think your dream means that maybe—he sought poetry, for that is the tongue of Weatherhead—memorials lose their miraculous moment of liberating the memory of someone when they are forever haunted by death. What I mean is—
Have you ever driven your fist into fog, she asked, by way of interruption, raped a siege of a city? Swayed spring feathers with a gun? Hit a ball out of the park with sugar?
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