Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “You didn’t ‘let’ her go. She decided that that was what she wanted to do and she went. Besides, you know she wouldn’t have gone back to Bernard Mitchell. You know that. She chose a different path, Gabe. Death isn’t the worst thing. But I think she took us both by surprise.”

  “Right. It’s just like walking through an open door.”

  We were standing on the balcony. The lake was calm. The weather chilly. A sloop was tacking out of the marina.

  “She’s having visions,” I said, regretting right away that I’d said it.

  “There, you see.”

  “They don’t make a lot of sense. I don’t know if they’re waking dreams or visions.” I didn’t tell her about the dream about my mother, but I told her about the dream she’d had about Jacques Derrida: the classroom at Yale, the blue sweater he was wearing, swinging his arm, telling her she couldn’t understand him, shaking hands with her…

  “Who’s Jacques Derrida?” she asked.

  “Olivia says he’s the source of a lot of dreary French theory that has yet to shed light on a single poem or story. As far as she was concerned, he was the devil.”

  “Go to hell, Gabriel Johnson. Don’t you dare make fun of her like that.” She started to cry. “Death is like an open door and you’re standing in the way, just like you’re standing in the light. Blocking the light.”

  I was in the process of discovering here just how angry I was. “I think you should leave now.”

  “I’m not leaving till I talk to her, or are you afraid to let me see her?”

  “Why would I be afraid?”

  “You tell me.”

  “All right,” I said. “Five minutes.”

  “Alone.”

  What was I afraid of? Another dark sermon? Another expulsion from the Garden? Another Flood? Another Tower of Babel? Another sacrifice on Mount Moriah?

  Five minutes went by. Slowly. Enough time to poach a large egg.

  Sarah came out and left without saying anything. I could see that the fight had gone out of her.

  I went in. Olivia was shivering. Cold or afraid? The room was warm, but her shivering had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

  “It will be all right,” I said. “Like walking through an open door.” And she started remembering doors at Yale, like the door to the Berkeley Common Room, doors and more doors, the doors on Wieboldt Hall at the University of Chicago, the doors at Rockefeller chapel and at St. Anne’s Episcopal, and the doors of restaurants where she’d eaten, the little white portico over the black door at Mory’s in New Haven, the door at Stefano’s on Merchant Street, the door to the Medici, with that 1327 over in the tympanum. “What happened in thirteen twenty-seven?” she asked.

  “Thirteen twenty-seven is the street number,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  We tried to remember all the doors in the house on Blackstone, but there were too many to count from memory, and I was glad when Saskia came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “What did Reverend Sarah have to say?”

  “She wanted to administer the sacraments.”

  “This afternoon?”

  “No. Later. When the time comes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I felt like Emma Bovary,” Olivia said, “after she was dead, with the priest sprinkling holy water around the room and the chemist pouring chlorine on the floor.”

  “So Sarah’s the priest?”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s the chemist?” Saskia asked.

  “You are!”

  “Shit. Me? Who’s Gabe?”

  “I’m not going to be Charles Bovary,” I said. “Don’t even think of it. I told her about your vision or dream of Jacques Derrida. She thought I was making fun of you.”

  “You know what I’ve figured out?” she said. “It was Jacques Derrida all right, but he looked like Professor Weaver. What a lovely man. Professor Weaver, I mean. I took both his Shakespeare classes. He lived across the street from you, didn’t he, on Blackstone?”

  “Across the street and a little farther north. I told her you thought Derrida was the devil, and she got mad.”

  Olivia tried to laugh. “Did you tell her about the other visions?”

  “Just the one.”

  “Dr. Kerry said I’d ‘see’ things.”

  “Do you want to see him again? Dr. Kerry, I mean. Not Jacques Derrida.”

  She shook her head and sank back into her pillow. “No, but he was right. I do see things. Last night I had another dream. This one was really strange. I’m walking down Pier Road toward the highway and I see a buffalo coming out of the state park, that’s how I know it’s not a real buffalo. Buffalo don’t live in the woods, do they? Anyway, I can still see the big shaggy head. It’s huge. I’m frightened. I’ve got the camera but it’s tied to a rope, and I whirl it around my head, thinking I can drive the buffalo away, but it keeps coming toward me.”

  “The plains Indians thought that the buffalo was a symbol of abundant life,” I said. “If a buffalo reveals itself to you, it’s a good thing. You shouldn’t try to push it or shove it away. You should take the easiest path. That’s what the buffalo does.”

  “How do you know this?” she asked.

  “George Catlin,” I said. “The Manners and Customs of the American Indians. I’m not sure I’ve got it exactly right, but close. We have a copy in the shop. I’ll bring it home tonight.”

  “I was trying to drive it away,” she said.

  “But it kept on coming, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it kept right on coming at me.”

  “And then?”

  “I just realized that this is what I’ll see at the end, once it’s clear that I’m not going back. I’ll see the buffalo, but this time I won’t try to drive it away.”

  “Mom, you should probably rest now.”

  “Birth and death are a lot of work,” she said. “I don’t know which one is harder.” She paused. “Saint Teresa in ecstasy. That was another one, not last night but a couple nights ago. Gabe was touching me with your little vibrator. I’ve never been to Rome, never seen the Bernini statues, but I’ve seen pictures. That was all I needed then. Just the tip of the vibrator, and then I was walking down Fifty-Seventh Street and Jock Weintraub drove by and waved.”

  “You used my vibrator? Mah-ahm!”

  “You shouldn’t have left it on your dresser.”

  “It was in the drawer.”

  “Maybe it was, I don’t remember. Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I thought Weintraub didn’t know how to drive,” I said.

  “He could in my dream.”

  “Mom,” Saskia said, “you never told us what happened on that retreat.”

  “I told Gabe,” she said. “I learned to turn towards the dark instead of away from it, turn toward the sharp edge.”

  “It didn’t do much good, did it?” Saskia said.

  Olivia adjusted her pillow a little. “Well, it’s hard to know,” she said.

  “Why is it hard to know? You looked terrible when you came back.”

  “You know the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”

  “The apple? Or probably a pomegranate.”

  “I think that the most important knowledge comes at a price,” Olivia said, “and once you’ve got it, you can’t go back. You have to pay the price. It’s experiential. Like sex. No one can explain it to you, and you can’t—you can’t just tell someone, can’t just explain it. I think that’s what happened to me. It’s something I can’t put into words. The words get all tangled up.”

  “For example?”

  “That’s my point. I can’t put it into words. But it wasn’t what I was expecting. Maybe it
never is. It took me a while to digest it, or come to terms with whatever it was. But I understand now why Abraham never spoke to his wife again after he almost killed Isaac. What could he say?”

  “Of course he couldn’t speak to her again,” Saskia said. “He was ashamed of himself.”

  “He wasn’t ashamed of himself,” Olivia said. “He was ashamed of God. And the Tower of Babel. Everyone working together. How often does that happen? I understand that too. God gets frightened. That’s why he stirs things up. I see that now. Do you think that’s what happened? Do you think God would be frightened if we all worked together? I think God is frightened right now. He can’t control things anymore. He can’t control us. He can’t stop us from loving each other. Look how many times he’s tried.”

  Saskia kissed her mother. “I’m going downstairs to read. Call me if you need anything.”

  Being alone with someone can be more intense than being alone by yourself. That’s how I felt when Olivia disappeared into her self. Or wherever she went. Maybe it wasn’t into her self but into some spiritual realm. Sometimes she came back exhausted, and sometimes refreshed.

  She thought a lot about doors and asked me to read and reread Sandburg’s poem “Circles of Doors,” which is not like anything else Sandburg wrote. “And I knew if I so wished I could follow her swift running through circles of doors.” I opened the curtains and let in a shaft of warm light.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  I kept on reading: “hearing, Sometimes her whisper, I love him, I love him, And sometimes only a high chaser of laughter, Somewhere five or ten doors ahead or five or ten Doors behind…”

  I couldn’t go any further. I sat down on the edge of the bed and massaged her feet.

  Sometimes we shared things you’d think a person couldn’t possibly share. Dangerous knowledge that we could have used against each other. We weren’t speaking anyone else’s lines. Not Montaigne’s, not Wordsworth’s. Just our own. Unscripted.

  One night she asked me to play my guitar. Booker was there, and she encouraged him to climb up on the bed so she could press her hand on the top of his wedge-shaped head and feel him stiffen his neck and press back. I no longer played much, never really mastered the tremolo, but I took my guitar out of its case and got out The American Songbag from a shelf in the living room that held my guitar music. I opened it to the first song: “I’m goin’ away for to stay for to stay a little while, But I’m comin’ back if I go ten thousand miles.” Too sad. I put the guitar away.

  Olivia asked if I’d answered my mother’s letter, and I told her no, and then she said, “I’ll leave this place and I’ll go ten thousand miles, but I won’t come back in a little while. I won’t come back at all. I’ll leave you and Saskia and Booker, and I won’t remember you at all.”

  “But we’ll remember you,” I said. “That’s the way it works.”

  “I understand that now,” she said.

  That was the best I could do. That’s the way it works. I’d absorbed plenty of wisdom about death from Montaigne and his Stoic mentors, but what does he do when his friend, La Boétie, is dying? He doesn’t know what to say, so he starts quoting: Terence, Horace, Virgil, then Terence and Horace again, then Catullus. And really, he falls apart. I had to check a similar impulse in myself—an impulse to start quoting Montaigne. But what did I want to say myself, unscripted, unrehearsed? I was thinking that now at last I understood the truth about love. Once again. But what I understood now was that it isn’t something you can put into words.

  How many times I’d thought I’d understood this truth, and I didn’t see how there could be any further truths beyond what I understood right now. But maybe that’s always the way it works. There are always further truths no matter how far you go. I didn’t see how I could go any further—making love to Shirley and then having a drink with Dad, putting Olivia on the Lakeshore Limited, seeing her reflection in the broken glass at the shop… I ran down the whole list in my mind.

  “You forgot something,” Olivia said, as if she’d been privy to my thoughts all along, or maybe I’d been speaking my thoughts out loud without realizing it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Wiping my forehead when I was in labor. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “But you never forgot Shirley, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess you never forget your first time.”

  “I forgot my first time. But I had a lot of first times. They all seemed different at the time, but looking back, I think they were all the same. I never told you. I didn’t want you to think I was… whatever. Besides, I always thought that God was watching me. That’s why I always wanted a sheet over me. At Yale…” She started to cry and smile and laugh at the same time.

  “Look,” I said. And then I said it again. “Look.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say that would explain it. “Look. Look. Look.”

  I let her cry for a while. “Let’s just keep on doing what we’re doing,” she said, “and reach our own conclusions. One more morning. At least.”

  XXIV. EPITAPHS

  (September 2011)

  We continued to go to our place with some coffee. Olivia brought down her laptop and started to respond to her editor’s notes and queries, but she didn’t have the energy to keep at it very long. We didn’t talk much. We watched the waves and tried to determine if every seventh wave was bigger than the other waves; and we watched the gulls and the terns and the dogs and the children playing on the beach as summer started to fade away. Olivia slept most of the time, and in her sleep she continued to dream about the buffalo. Sometimes she saw it down on the beach, playing with Booker and Barley and Whitefoot. Or coming out of the sauna, or just poking around in the yard. “I take pictures in my imagination,” she said. “I wish I could show them to you.”

  I went to the shop every morning, after we’d had our coffee on the balcony, and worked on our new catalog. Adam and Carla were doing most of the heavy lifting. Adam had his ear to the ground and his nose too, sussing out estate sales, keeping in touch with our old network of collectors and dealers, showing our wares at book fairs. Our online business was good; Carla’s video blogs were attracting followers across the country; we’d hired a professional photographer to photograph the books for the catalogs and the online website—no monoliths, no distracting backgrounds, no distracting optical effects, no knickknacks, no Renaissance perspective studies—just long focal length shots to minimize keystone distortion.

  Olivia’s “100 Greats” didn’t bring in a lot of money, but they brought people into the depot in the afternoons—townspeople, students, and faculty from the college. Innkeepers had set out bistro tables along the corridor and it was a pleasure to see customers sitting at one of the tables turning the pages of a recent purchase. I took photos to show Olivia. She herself was slipping in and out of time. Sometimes she seemed to be talking to herself, or to some unseen companion. Her lips moving. I’d paged through our copy of Catlin’s Manners and Customs. Catlin’s documentation of the great buffalo herds was impressive, but I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for—about what it meant for a buffalo to appear in your life. Maybe I couldn’t find it because I’d made it up, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I could find something like it. Maybe when there was more time.

  The fall equinox slipped by us before we reached any definite conclusions. We’d reach some conclusions, of course, but then there were always more conclusions to be reached.

  We were reading the 1805 Prelude in the Salincourt Edition. The book was on Olivia's lap when I came into the room with a cup of tea.“Crushed red morocco over red cloth boards,” she said, “like your Montaigne. “Raised bands, floral designs in the spine compartments and marbled end papers.”

  “You get an A for descriptive bibliography,” I said. I sat down on the bed next to her and t
ook the book out of her hands. “Do you want a pain pill?” I asked.

  “I just want to investigate the pain,” she said. “I want to interrogate it. It’s not that bad.”

  We were reading Book I, “Childhood,” in the 1805 text, and I could hear time passing as I read. It sounded like the waves lapping the beach, like the lines of the poem. I skipped ahead to one of her favorite passages, one of mine too, because it reminded me of the times we’d skated together on the Midway.

  Not seldom from the uproar I retired

  Into a silent bay, or sportively

  Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,

  To cut across the image of a star.

  She raised her hand, as if we were in a classroom. “Did you know,” she said, “that in 1799, it’s the shadow of a star, in 1805 it’s image, and in 1850, it’s the reflex of a star?”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “I like reflex. How about you?”

  She didn’t answer. I kept on reading.

  That gleamed up on the ice. And oftentimes

  When we had given our bodies to the wind,

  And all the shadowy banks on either side

  Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still

  The rapid line of motion, then at once

  Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

  Stopped short—yet still the solitary cliffs

  Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled

  With visible motion her diurnal round.

  Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,

  Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched

  Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

  I massaged her feet for a while, till she went to sleep. I pulled the covers back over her feet, not realizing at the time that these were probably the last words she would ever hear. At least she never really woke up after that. But when she died, two days later, her head was cocked, as if she was still listening. Her eyes were open. There was still some blue in them. And I thought that she’d seen the buffalo. And then I thought that not only had she seen the buffalo, she was the buffalo—not just the sign of abundant life, but abundant life itself. And I hung on to this thought for about an hour before calling Carl Abrams. We had a plan, but now that it had happened, I wasn’t sure it would be okay to leave her overnight.