by JoeAnn Hart
When the cut was done, Mrs. Suarez put the knife down and shoved both hands into the cavity, digging around, loosening things up, and then pulled a mess of stringy offal into the pan. She took Vita’s hand and pressed it into the opening. It was like one of those childhood initiations of squeezing “eyeball” Jell-O or tasting “worm egg” tapioca, except this was so very hot and smelled like goose feces, but Vita refused to let herself be sick. She could feel the hardness of the heart under the rib cage. Mrs. Suarez asked her if she could feel the liver on the other side. “El higado?” Oh, yes. It was her fat liver as nature intended, a slippery jewel.
She wanted to yank the organ out of the body, but Mrs. Suarez shook her head no, so Vita retreated empty-handed. With the concentration of a midwife, Mrs. Suarez pulled the rest of the guts out and into the pan. She motioned for Paolo to lean in closer with the flashlight so she could point out the small green sac attached to the liver. It was the gall bladder, and if it should break, the liver would be ruined. Vita handed her the knife, and with a flick Mrs. Suarez slashed the sac off in one piece, handing the liver to Vita. It quivered warmly in her hand, dark and intense, and she laid it in her white container and quickly sealed it so not a drop of its essence would be lost to the air. She flushed with the heat of her accomplishment. Dr. Nicastro would be so proud.
After that, they worked in a frenzy of gutting, while the boys dug a ditch for the intestines. Vita reserved the hearts, the rock-hard gizzards, and the sheets of fat that lined the stomach cavity. Everything else was garbage. But would it be garbage to a pig? Or just dinner? If she kept even one pig next summer at the Club, think of the luau she could throw.
Mrs. Suarez acted as line manager, pointing to this goose or that, directing the cages to be folded flat and returned to the skiffs, and sending the boys back and forth with bags as they filled up. Off in the distance, a cock crowed. Phoebe Lambert’s roosters were sounding the alarm of sunrise. Phoebe had rescued them from a layer hatchery, where males, useless in the female world of the egg, were destroyed. A few weeks ago, Dr. Nicastro, who’d heard it from Mrs. Lambert, had told Vita that the birds fought each other with spurs all day long and the neighbors were circulating a petition. Vita smiled. She would be happy to take them. Coq au vin?
When the last goose was eviscerated, Vita stood up slowly, drenched with blood. The boys splashed buckets of water on the cones to rinse them and kicked dirt over the congealed blood on the ground. They dumped the last of the guts in the ditch and buried them, then covered them with rocks so animals would not dig them up. Everyone washed their hands the best they could from buckets they brought from the lake, and Vita wiped her knives clean with a cloth and put them away. The boys wrenched the cones from the trees, dismantled the table, and sat down on the rocks to eat croissants and drink orange juice with their mother.
Vita had no appetite, but she laid out four plastic cups and poured a thimbleful of cognac in each. Paolo and Anselmo got back to their feet for this unforeseen bonus. The day, still not quite begun, was already warming up, so they pulled their wet, stained sweatshirts over their heads. Underneath they wore Mr. Clay’s shirts, but with the sleeves and collars ripped away, unbuttoned halfway down their handsome chests. Very teenage macho, she thought, with their arms dark and muscled against the fine white cloth. And they knew it, preening loose feathers off their bodies for Vita’s benefit. She handed them cognac, and one to Mrs. Suarez, who patted her on the shoulder in return. They raised their cups to the geese and drank. She felt good. She’d done it. To the Great Goose in the Sky. Thank you.
Vita checked her watch. Almost five thirty. “Vamos,” she said. They had to hurry. She looked up at the light gray sky for crows, but it was empty. Good. If those scavengers picked up the scent of blood, they would hector them the whole way back to the club-house and wake the neighbors. Phoebe would call the police to report that someone was harassing the crows. But they were making good time and would easily beat the crows, the eager-beaver golfers, and Gerard. The cleaning crew would already be at work. Luisa was baking pasteis de nata, flaky pastry cups filled with egg custard, a Portuguese goody to lure them down to the kitchen so Vita could sneak the geese in through the front door.
They collected the last few things, but just as they were about to leave, Mrs. Suarez held up a bloodstained hand. “Espera,” she commanded. They waited as she pulled a handful of Hershey’s Kisses out of her cardigan pocket and left them on the rock. She pointed to the sky, shrugged, and smiled. “Los dios.”
The boys elbowed each other and shook their heads, but Vita nodded, and they left the clearing. It was too bad she hadn’t known that they were expected to leave a small offering. She could have brought Scharffen Berger, a proper chocolate with which to thank the gods.
Chapter Twenty-three
Re-teeing the Shot
EARLY SUNDAY, after feverishly working through the night, Charles wiped his forehead with a rag, then snapped the welder’s mask back down over his face. The world turned swampy green, as if he’d been plunged into thick primordial water. As he picked up his torch again, he imagined himself happily bobbing along with the first Precambrian cells, all trying to figure out this warm cocktail called Life. That’s what welding felt like, every moment an act of discovery. There was a time—eons ago by his new inner clock, but probably just a matter of weeks by normal reckoning—when the thought of spending a morning not at golf but in the cool darkness of his garage with the smells of solder and oil and metal, the raw materials of creation, would have been alien to him. Now it was his very joy.
The torch trailed a long line down to its power source, the TIG welder, and Charles—in tune now to every change in his environment—took a cautionary glance at the snaking presence of the cord as he climbed the ladder. He had specific gravity now. He knew where his body was in space—knew exactly where to reach for what he needed. Look how tools were designed to the scale of his calloused hand—a world created by humans for humans—for it was tools that made man a formidable animal. Even the humble ladder upon which he stood had rungs spaced to accommodate both the limitations and boundlessness of the human step. Proportion was everything. A simple change could jar the viewer—to make one look, to pay attention.
All this he owed to the goose who had so innocently stood in the path of his Pro V1, forcing him to examine the balance sheet of his soul. Madeline euphemistically called the incident “his accident,” but Charles saw it for what it was. His fate. Without transgression there could be no knowledge, and the bird’s life had been sacrificed so that he could know his own—and what a sorry sight that had been. Lacking in meaning, tepid in feeling, and misspent at the altar of affluence.
To be fair, how could he have turned out otherwise with all those Calvinist genes coursing through his blood? For generations his family had equated prosperity with virtue, seen material thriving as the path to salvation. But he could have, should have, fought against his natural bent—DNA was not destiny. Twenty-five years toiling in the salt mines of finance was the price he had paid. From now on he must elect a higher path, even though it might not be so generously paved with luxury goods. And what did that matter anyway? Purchases and possessions had lost their power. When he bought that new club last February it had done nothing for him—what he needed was equipment to straighten out his life, not his drive.
He eyed his creation and made a mental note to get more twist in the structure, more flexibility. God knows that’s what he’d always needed himself. He could barely even turn his head without turning his entire body, as if his spine, neck, and skull were welded together and not a pliable construction of nature. Steeve had told him as much—that the more he could twist, the more power he would have—but he had taken the advice too literally, spending too much energy trying to contort his body rather than his mind.
But other than that bit of stiffness, he was pleased with how his creation was shaping up. It was invigorating to be actually making something, to be so intimately e
ngaged in the physical world, listening to the music of his own hammering. He flicked on the torch and leaned in, so close to the heat and the white light he felt himself melting into the work itself. From under his mask, he breathed in deeply of the metallic smoke, incorporating it into his body. He began to heat up the iron plate. There was so little room for error—and the price of such an error was so high—that he was soon lost in concentration. It was just him and the light, out in the universe—with the sound of the machine: Om-m-m-m. Om-m-m.
When the heat seared off the exact sliver of metal, he was sorry to have it end. When he lifted up his mask, the color of his studio turned natural again, but somehow it seemed less than real. Nod had once told him about maskenfribeit—the freedom conferred by masks. Nod loved not only to wear the welding mask, but to use it as his subject matter as well. He welded intricate and moving portrait busts of his friends and family—then fitted the faces with blank sheets of metal so that only the artist knew what was underneath. It was all very “high concept” to Charles. And yet he loved to hear Nod talk about it—he liked to appraise his progress, lend a hand—a son he never had. He flashed on the odd quote pasted up on the wall at school: “?‘Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’—Blake.” He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it always made him think of Madeline nursing Phoebe, and how happy they had been then. Why had they only had the one? They should have had more, but he had balked. He thought they’d have to divide their love for Phoebe among others, like an inheritance. But maybe love didn’t have to be allocated and accounted for. Maybe it grew the more it was spent. He should not have been so afraid of creation.
While he waited for the cut to cool, he ran a leather-gloved hand along the spiraling shafts that served as tendons and decided here was where he could increase fluidity. A few adjustments—here, there. It was a risk to make a change—a positive correction in one place could have a detrimental effect in another. In life as well. An examination of historical data showed a high correlation between material escalation and family dissatisfaction. He, numb; his daughter, rebellious; his wife, depressed. Phoebe was probably just going through a phase—not that it was a phase he ever went through, being an odd conservative duck in his own sixties generation—but Madeline. . .sweet, sad Madeline. He’d fallen in love with her for her happy outlook and wild sense of freedom, but where did it go? What had he done?
He took off his gloves to fondle the cutlery in a box he kept under the workbench. This was the life, to add beauty to the world. He turned the fork over in his bare hand, letting the utensil’s essence tell him where it should go. How balanced it was. How ingenious. A financial instrument had nothing on even the simplest physical object. He flipped it over and ran his thumb along the wavy tracings engraved on the handle—Damascene. Great word. People would have to search for the hidden pleasure of it. They would have to look for it.
Could he get Madeline to look? Could he get her to move? There was a time when she would have gone anywhere with him, but she was not quite so game anymore. The fact remained: If he quit his job, they could not afford to stay here, and would they even want to live in a neighborhood where the overriding ambition was to be like everyone else? A place where everyone examined one another’s lives so closely that it left no time to look at their own? Maybe they should go back to the beginning, go to California, where they’d met, where Madeline was born. Buy a house among the redwoods, build a studio out back. His sculpture was so large now that he had to take care that it didn’t get any taller or he wouldn’t be able to get it out of the garage bay. What he needed were ceilings twenty, thirty feet high. Nothing could stop him then.
With a start, he felt the garage shake and creak from the banging of goat horns against the outside wall. He could not see the goats because the garage windows had been boarded up for their protection—and his privacy—but he could hear them. They clacked their heads all day in play. How free and unselfconscious they were. He would have to build a barn as well.
He picked out a few more forks and put them in the back pocket of his mustard Carhartts, suddenly impatient for their new life to begin. He would take the week off from the office to finish his project so that by this very weekend Madeline could gaze upon his monument, and she would rediscover him, and he her. His sculpture would be the key to unlatch their door. Art would redeem them.
He climbed up the ladder and ran his bare hand, too soon, over the spot where he’d just worked, and it was so hot he almost drew back at the touch. But then he remembered what Vincent had said about staying with his pain—so he let his hand rest. It was not long before the burning sensation began to draw something from inside of him—a pulsing wave surging through his whole body. Something less than blood, something more than memory. What was it? When had he felt like this before? This swelling in his chest? This clarity and acceptance? This peace.
He steadied his footing on the stepladder and leaned his head against the warm body of the sculpture. His hand was still on the hot spot, a conduit, waiting, and as the heat moved from metal to flesh, he refelt a moment from many years before—a lifetime, his life—when he had passed a younger hand across the sun-warmed hood of his first BMW, the maroon 1974 Tii that his father, dead now for more than fifteen years, gave him when he graduated from MIT with a major in business—not in aerodynamics, as he had once dreamed of but was too cautious to pursue. But the road noise of his prized BMW turned out to be so loud that he always imagined himself in the cockpit, flying.
The warmth spread through him and made him sleepy. He released his sculpture and sat down on the top step of the ladder, bowing his head in exhaustion, causing the mask to flick back down over his face. And he left it like that, reaching underneath to rub his eyes, releasing tears. How he loved that car, and how soon he had set it aside. After his first promotion, he had bought a newer, more expensive model, which, in its turn, was replaced by another. “Chasing the material dragon,” Phoebe had accused him last year when he pulled the new 525i into the driveway—but he hadn’t understood. He hadn’t understood so much for so long. In fact, he had told her—with some pride—of his reserve in foregoing the 745i at almost twice the price. She snapped, in that impatient way of hers. “Chasing the dragon is slang, Dad, for trying to recapture your first great high. The thing is, it can’t be done, no matter what you shoot up. No matter what you buy.”
Where had she picked up such concepts? he had wondered—which only went to show how he was always asking the wrong questions. He sniffed and caught a drip on his flannel sleeve. How could he have been so dense as to not see that he was being given more than keys to a simple car? They were the keys to the world. How eloquent an object can be. He mourned for that car, gone forever, long buried in some wretched landfill with all the other discards. And then he mourned his father for what seemed like the very first time.
He cried easily under the mask. The death of his father had always seemed a distant episode—kept at arm’s length. How tremendously long his arm had been. He’d thought he was being so mature, taking it like a man. In truth, he’d been afraid, not wanting to be prey to his own emotions.
But who said pain had to be orderly, or that emotions were a predator to be evaded?
Charles lifted his mask and wiped his nose on his sleeve, then let it drop again. He felt so much better. He stood back up on the top step and faced his art, then switched on the torch, letting it burn. An elegant twist was not enough—his work had to writhe. Beauty was all well and good, but passion, that was the driving force. He bore down on the metal with the flame, and it turned violently white from the heat. It was a risk—but so be it.
All was blackness except for the flame itself. The light, the fork, and a small puddle of melting solder. But from these few inches of vision, anything could happen.
Chapter Twenty-four
The Water Hazard
MADELINE STOOD at the edge of the pool, looking down at the still, green water. The soles of he
r feet burned from the hot cobbled surface of the deck. She lifted one foot, then another, getting used to the pain. Her sandals were back in the cool darkness of the changing room, but any discomfort was preferable to running into Ellen Bruner again.
“I’m looking forward to meeting with you and Arietta at the end of the week,” Ellen had said as she crossed the corridor to go to the sauna, tightening a mocha towel around her body.
“Oh, that’s right,” said Madeline, pretending the tea had slipped her mind. Earlier in the day, Arietta had told her that Ellen asked to meet again, and they didn’t quite know what to make of it. “Friday’s okay, then?”
“Perfect,” said Ellen. “I’ll be in court all week, so it’ll be a pleasant start to the Labor Day weekend.”
Madeline was about to say something about the sauna, lifting her hand to the red sign at the door that cautioned pregnant women to avoid extreme heat. But then she caught herself. Perhaps there was no more pregnancy. A miscarriage? A change of plans after amnio revealed a fetus not quite altogether? Was this why Ellen wanted to meet?
Madeline felt a rush of compassion. How heartbreaking. At Ellen’s age, she wouldn’t have too many more chances left to roll the dice. On Friday, Madeline would comfort her and hold her hand. Better than that, she would cry with Ellen as if the loss were her own. Yes, she would start fresh, reaching out to people in a whole new way. Madeline let her hand fall back to her side. “See you then.”
“Yes, indeed.” Ellen gave her an odd little smile and closed the sauna door behind her.
Now, as she listlessly scanned the pool for Frank, Madeline stood like a crane, with one foot resting on the inside of the other leg. The water seemed murky as it reflected the overcast sky, which had not cooled the late-afternoon air but compressed it. Her foot slid back down her leg from sweat.