j, my j, you’ve recanted.
Shouldn’t “recant” mean to sing again?
to hear my own breathing
If I woke in the night, the precious nights I had you here, I was always taken aback at how hard it was to detect your breaths. Even when you were deeply out (pretty much always) your breathing was delicate; once or twice I almost panicked, you know how the mind works at night, and there were always those footlights of unease around our meetings, fear of your husband interrupting our, uh, tutorial with a call, so that panic would feed on puny fears and several times I actually put the back of my hand to your open mouth to feel the breaths. Then my mouth next to yours to breathe them in. That close, I found you breathing, of course, calm and profound, with a faint sighing wheeze in your lungs, under your bare breasts, which were pillowed one over the other as you lay furled on your side. Your breath smelled fine, spicy, with a subtle finish of garlic and Syrah. Then one night it changed. That’s how I knew we were coming to an end. More conventional signs had materialized as well—your canned laughter, diluted gaze, undilated pupils—but that was how I knew: the last two nights your breath turned unfamiliar in your sleep. Changes deep inside, where I couldn’t reach. I wonder about the air in that blocked tunnel, after forty years of disuse. Is oxygen stable or does it deteriorate over time? I wouldn’t know. Your husband would. Could toxic fumes have seeped in through the limestone? If the ends were unblocked tonight, could we still walk through it and breathe? How long does a closed-off tunnel remain a possible route?
always in dialogue
To you it may have felt that way. You’re the one with other allegiances. (More of them, maybe, than I thought.) A day came when I abandoned my latest stalled article to check email—still dial-up then—maybe thirty times, hoping for a reply. You must have been reflecting a little. Finally I just remained online, waiting. I answered a few other “urgent” emails that I’d left to ripen for days, maybe weeks. That took some time. I’ve never learned, like you, to crash out a reply, in lowercase, in the current electronic shorthand that I am still not used to—insulting!—though I see it all the time from my students :) Did those. Waited. Stared at the empty inbox and willed a message to appear. For quite some time I stuck it out. Funny, I’ve never once sat staring at the phone, though you would sometimes call me. Staring at a phone seems somehow goofier. A screen is meant to be stared at. Things are meant to appear there. Maybe I could induce you to write me. Eventually I took the modem cord and slunk the three flights down to the lobby and locked it in the morgue-like drawer of my mailbox. Came upstairs for a double Campari and soda. Left the cord down there for a good half-hour.
i am sorry if this feels abrupt or my reasons feel vague, they just must be
Oh and another nice thing about email: you are always sitting down to read it. No more Puccini swoons, buckling to the floor with the farewell letter clinched in one hand, the other cupping the brow. Instead, you settle deeper in your chair. The world stops entering your mind through the senses. You’ve been sealed off with your obsession, and shame. my reasons … must be kept vague. I always knew there were truths you wouldn’t tell me, so I avoided entering certain corridors of inquiry; but there was also an implication, about the two of us, that we just knew—we UNDERSTOOD. William Burroughs said that gay love differs from straight love because a queer lover (“homosexual” was how he put it, I believe) always knows what the other is thinking and feeling, while a straight lover never does. Hmmm … better that I did my thesis on Bloomsbury and Woolf, instead of (a quip over cocktails, long ago) “Bloomsbury & the Beats: Points of Unexpected Comparison.”
as i guess i implied
Didn’t we make a pact never to do this sort of thing? To guess and imply? To become, in each other’s sight, hazy at the margins by delivering half-truths? That’s how people deconsecrate themselves, from human into something less. Spectres. Cyborgs. Didn’t I mention this opinion? Not that you listened well, ever. Speaking of blockages. Consider the ears of the egotist … Now, as I listen, trying to peer through this blockage, I wonder if you are alone. There’s your husband, of course, but he doesn’t count. Two daughters. Neither do they. For the purpose of this madness only somebody else counts. (Especially if female.) You told me I was the first woman you had been with. Is there another now? Have I created a monster?
i have been asked to keep secrets
The cathedral’s literature (I went and took one of their free tourist leaflets; lit a lampion for the hell of it) gives no clue as to how, or with what, the passageway was sealed.
i know you understand
See above under Burroughs, William.
you, after all, are one of my secrets
One of your … excuse me? I thought this was an exclusive engagement! Now I’m no longer your secret, I’m one of your secrets? Um, are your secrets a clique now? A category? A women’s collective? All on the same level … Maybe your secrets should be more civil about this. Maybe they should all get used to one another. Your secrets are “all in this together”… no rank, no priority, no hierarchy of closeness … it’s a sorority, a full democracy of secrets! The one exact thing that love isn’t.
as you know yourself
Oh, I do. One of us had to end it. The question is: who began it, Janet? Another reference that dates me and, by omission, you. We have all the particulars. The year (2002). The season (summer). The place (Kingston). The course (Religious Imagery in Popular Culture and Contemporary Women’s Fiction), and you in semi-attendance to steal time—admit it, finally, you’re a dabbler, a summer slummer—away from your aphasic husband and colicky twins. When you went back to Winnipeg in the fall, I assumed it was over, but the thing wouldn’t die. Since then I’ve propped everything on your annual holiday here in the Thousand Islands.
maybe a severing
New word for an old context. Feels more honest than “spend a little time apart,” anyway. And honesty is what we all want at such times. But severing—there is a hard word. I’d never noticed the “severe” in it before. Or really heard the sound of it before. SEVering. The oiled blade sliding down to separate head from body with a blunt, chunky sound.
a temporary severing
Whew! For a minute there I thought it was permanent! As if it was in the very nature of severings to be that way … But a moment’s reflection allows us to generate any number of counter-examples. In the fatal crash, the victim’s spinal cord was temporarily severed. As the glaciers retreated, rising sea waters temporarily severed Asia from North America. Alas, it proved necessary to sever the miner’s gangrenous limb temporarily. Somehow the bungee jumper’s cord was severed in mid-leap—but only temporarily!
for both of you
You always wrote your emails fast, furtively, late at night or early in the morning, and there were always misspellings or little misnomers like this one. “Both of us,” I assume you meant. You and me. Because there aren’t two people hereabouts, in my world, my room. All the same … maybe you did half-mean that I’ve been as split apart as you. Between wanting to respect your family commitments and wanting you all to my lonesome? Nope: between wanting not to violate the current student–teacher protocol (which I always supported and still believe in and which the dying white males of the department, just them, allegedly, still flout when they can) and wanting to violate, repeatedly, you.
for everyone involved
Everyone! How did they get into this again? How I detest them! From the moment a love starts, Everyone is clamouring to get in, huffing and prodding, mobbing the door that a new couple seals fast and barricades—Everyone trying to peep through, push through, leaving messages, making demands. I should have known Everyone would get to us. They always do. Over and over I’ve lived my life for those days before they do.
i am determined to get through this time
The ambiguity! It makes me insane! How many times have I been over this one, trying to uncrate it? You are determined to ride out this painful, severe time in
your life? Or: you are determined, this time, to get through? Let it be the first option! Let it be that this hurts you as much as it hurts me. Let this not be yet another unacceptable revelation—that our affair wasn’t your first of the kind. You said it was. Now you might be saying that there was another time and you didn’t get through it—never got over her. (Or him.) Other times? Who? Who? This vision of multitudes barging into your inbox, your bedroom, your body.
i will get in touch again when i feel i can
What’s this if not a melodramatic way of saying, Don’t call us, we’ll call you? My people will call your people. My multitudes will call your solitude … but don’t hold your breath. (Whatever remains in that sealed place.) Cave exploration is something you always said you wanted to try out. I can hardly bear to use the correct, ridiculous term. Spelunking. I spelunk, you spelunk. We will spelunk. She had spelunked. So we’ll go no more spelunking. Partly this is why I keep bringing up that sealed tunnel—not as some elaborate genital metaphor, but because I know you would be interested and maybe want to explore it. Count me out, though. Daredevils come in aerial or subterranean form. How many folks do you know who have both skydived and spelunked? Doesn’t happen. When you would talk about spelunking, I would counter with skydiving, my own potential death-wish hobby. We had to compromise on the earth’s surface—on driving really, really fast those few times when we were far from Everyone together. Rental cars are good for that: convertibles. A Thelma & Louise outtake, except people probably took me for your aunt, or duenna. Remember the highway into the Cypress Hills? How amazed you were that such committed flatness could collect itself into hills—small mountains, our ears popping as we drove—the way your life seemed to be climbing up from the plains of your comfortable present onto high ridges of possibility …
love always
But there’s hope here, isn’t there, there’s not just a name, and not just “love”—no, it’s “love always,” even if there is the one conspicuous, crushing change, the absence of your usual starburst of xxxxxooooo. Or xoxoxoxo. It always varied. I go back through the emails now (printed out, of course—there’s a paper trail after all, sweetie, though you prudently avoided writing letters)—I pore over them again, studying, tabulating the details of the x and o firework finale of all your emails, one hundred and fifty-eight in all, but especially the last twenty or so. I am trying to track the decline. How does the end enter? Where does it get in? In your most passionate note (I won’t say email), right after the Cypress Hills Escapade, there were no less than ten x’s and seven o’s. (Why fewer o’s than x’s? Why stint like that on the o’s? And what are x’s and o’s anyway? Kisses and embraces, embraces and kisses. We argued about which were which. To both of us it seemed obvious, a matter of common sense and common knowledge, and we were stunned, in a loving way, by the other’s ignorance. You said, “O is the lips open for a deep kiss, X is the arms crossed over the embraced lover’s back.” Touched by this effort I replied, “Ingenious but wrong. O is the circle of the embracing lover’s arms, X is the eye of the lover, the eyes, closed, X-ed out in the rapture of the kiss.”) Love as a game of noughts and crosses. Nine emails before the end, I find all my love, j, xxxoooxx. Again this marked privileging of x over o. (Five and three.) Five messages before the end, Love forever, j, xxxxoo. (Four and two.) Three messages before the end, o makes something of a comeback, outnumbering x for the first time in many missives, Love, j, ooxxxooo. In fact, the total number of signs here, eight, suggests if anything a strengthening of passion! Next, email 156, where o makes its final strong showing, my love, j, ooxoo—with the lone x almost lost among those still fervent hugs (or kisses???). Number 157, the second-last, shows this tic-tac-toe showdown entering its endgame, though the salutation—yours always, j, ox—almost seems to cancel out that lack.
j
I’m to be spared the final humiliation. You’ll remain j to me, not Janet-Marie. In signing off, you could have withdrawn that intimate, tiny link between us, that hook lodged in my heart, and keyed in your full name. You chose not to; something does remain unsevered. And after all, if the Greek in the labyrinth (you never remember the names), slowly unreeling his ball of yarn so he could find his way back, had accidentally cut the thread—maybe on a cornering wall, a knife-edge of stone—he might have sensed it break and then groped his way back in the darkness, feeling for the lost end, splicing the yarn, persevering. We’re back in the tunnel, you see. Despite my fear, I think I would go down and explore it with you, if they ever opened it up again. I am drawn to a fantasy of fucking you there, maybe in a side tunnel or cul-de-sac, tugging you away from the tedious tour group with its silly costumed guide to make slow, wordless love in the kind of darkness that people never really do it in. What would that be like? To have not the faintest glimpse or inkling of the one beside you, above you, below you? So the orgasm I’d give you, the way you liked it best, would star the gloom, seeming to project on the walls a brief, grand, enveloping galaxy. There we would be our own source of light. I don’t want to see anything now. Darkness is far from the worst. Your note is very short. Worst is the whiteness of most of the printout under that j. So I’ve filled it and other pages, your faithful annotator and emptied teacher, with these notes, endnotes, that our dialogue not die.
[ FIREMAN’S CARRY ]
In memory of John Chappelle, 1954–2007
We shoulder the coffin of my friend Warren Reed down the front steps of the church and on toward the hearse’s gaping back door. It reminds me of the receiving mouth of a crematorium, that door—how a coffin will glide through and into the discreetly quiet, white-hot furnace beyond. I always wonder how they manage to keep such a ravenous blaze so quiet.
I’ve read somewhere that fire, to certain ancient peoples, was an animal, as alive and on the same level as humans, horses, birds, fish, insects, everything. It’s easy—especially for someone who has fought fires, and walked inside them—to imagine how the belief arose. Fire breathes air, like us. Fire eats wood as well as the flesh of animals, the dead as well as the living. It moves on its own, it has a voice and a vocabulary, it can seed itself and propagate, it can hibernate deep in the roots of trees and fully revive, it leaves a sort of bodily waste behind, it attacks, it withdraws, it can be tamed and domesticated, and finally, when it has eaten everything, it starves or else smothers or perishes by drowning. I’ve read, too, about a certain desert tribe who believed that while animals understood the language of fire, humans had somehow lost it, along with the other animal tongues—but that each person at the moment of death regained the capacity to understand. This tribe believed their dead should never be buried but instead burned, so the living flames could guide and sing the dead into the afterlife.
There will be no flames today, though—no furnace door. Firefighters seldom incline to the crematory option. Once we load my friend into the hearse, we’ll be getting into our cars and merging into the motorcade heading out to the cemetery on the outskirts of town, or what used to be the outskirts. Green and peaceful, breezy grounds, tall, stately hardwoods two centuries old.
My friend’s maple coffin is—do I need to say this?—heavy on our shoulders, though it’s not the burden it might be for an average pallbearer. There are six of us, and the five who wear full dress uniform (I’m the odd one out, in my formal civvies) are all in good shape, the way I used to be when I was signing in to the fire hall gym four times a week and carrying serious poundage into and out of burning buildings.
Then there’s the fact that we’re getting used to bearing these coffins and sliding them into hearses. It’s not what you might think, either—not fatalities on the job, floors and burning walls collapsing, chemical explosions. An occupational epidemic of cancer is what it is, cancer of the brain, cancer of the liver, plenty of lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, cancer from all the burning crud we’re inhaling in all the factories, garages, condos and offices we try to save. Still, my friend feels heavy in his coffin, this virtually bombproof carapace wh
ose protection he could have used in life, on the job, but now has zero use for.
I left the department over a year ago. I’m doing sedentary work now, not exciting, but it’s a job, it’s safe, it pays decently, and to tell the truth I rarely miss the challenge and adrenal rush of what I used to love doing. Plus I work at home, meaning more family time and none of the strife and stress of working with others. That endless chafing of personalities. It was an awkward resignation, if you can call it that. (Did I fall or was I pushed? A bit of both. If I’d wanted to fight it, the union could have saved my job, I’m pretty sure, maybe after moving me to another hall.)
So we ease my friend into the hearse and there’s a curious interlude, nobody sure who should close the back door. Standing beside us in a too-big black suit, the funeral director’s assistant—a thin, fidgety kid who looks like he should be slouching along in loose jeans and an undershirt—hesitates too. Is it his job to close the door? This might be his first funeral. For a moment we stand looking around, then downward, the crew at their own spit-buffed parade boots, me at my laceless, matte-black shoes, shoes shaped like a platypus’s bill. They’re clean and new, not too informal, I feel, though suddenly I wonder. A couple of my ex-crewmates are having a look at them, and they seem to baffle the giant crew captain, Jack Steiger. He and I never got along too well, especially at the end. And yet he surprised me yesterday by calling and gruffly inviting me to join the rest of the crew as a pallbearer. Most people, I’ve come to see, surprise you more often, not less, as they get older.
The Dead Are More Visible Page 10