by Carole Maso
“OK,” he says, holding a shiny key.
Slowly we rise. In the small mirrored elevator I can feel him everywhere. The ride is seconds, hours. We step off. The hall is long and dark. The key goes into the lock. “We will make ourselves over,” he says. The door opens.
The hotel room was warm. I felt dizzy, a little giddy.
“I’m going to faint,” I said.
“No, no, you’re not,” he said, and I felt somewhat revived with his words. “Just sit down.”
I sat on the bed and took off my coat and he sat in the one chair of the room, several feet away, and looked at me.
“You’re trembling,” I said.
“Am I? I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” he said. He spoke very softly. “And now here you are, right within arm’s reach. It’s like a miracle.”
I unbuttoned my shirt slowly. My breasts bloomed in front of him in the hot room. “I’m so hot,” I whispered.
He closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. Finally, after what seemed a long time, he looked up slowly, careful not to move too quickly or say anything too loudly, as if I was on the verge of disappearing and this, his first look, would also be his last. If I was an apparition, then he must do nothing to dispel it from his psyche. If I was some wild animal, caught in this room, any sudden movement might frighten me. He spoke very cautiously, as if he might bruise me with his words if he were not careful. He spoke gently so that the image might hold.
“You are the anonymous woman I have seen for years.” He did not take his eyes from me.
“Don’t move,” he said slowly. “Please don’t move.” He looked at my breasts as if he had not imagined that this woman would have a physical shape at all when he finally saw her—and a voice—words. “I never expected to see you,” he said.
My face was flushed. The long, slow burning that had started deep within had now begun spreading from the inside out. The tips of my fingers were bright red. My eyes I knew were turning dark, dark blue.
“Please don’t move,” he said as he took off his shirt and his pants. He never stopped looking at me.
I shuddered to see this enormous man naked in front of me. Undressed, he seemed even larger, as if he had been in some way contained by his clothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “Don’t be afraid of me.”
He laughed softly.
I reached for his hand and pulled him slowly toward me.
“I’ve never seen a woman like you before,” he said, his voice barely controlled. “I never thought—”
I guided his huge hand onto my breasts. A moan that had been stored for centuries in the darkest part of my body finally came into my throat. He looked more animal now than man as he scratched at my pants, trying to tear them from my body as if they were some second skin. “Let me—” I could not talk. He was sucking softly on my neck.
He got up and stood high over me and stared. I kicked off my pants and in one moment, as I closed my eyes to avoid his brutal stare, he plunged deep, far, hard into my body. He had fallen on me as if into a fire, howling and in terror. If he rose again he would not be the same, as one is not who has been badly burned or hurt. He would be changed forever. And I, who was the fire, grew larger and larger as he fed himself to me. I was enveloping him, his fingers, his mouth, his whole body. There was fire in his mouth, fire in his hair, the flames licking him everywhere—blue flames, orange, white—everywhere. It grew and grew. It burned all night.
The fire did not die in sleep, which came finally to us around five that morning. Now that it had been started there would be no stopping it. No long night, no water, no dream could extinguish it. There are fires like that, I am told, in California or Africa, that never end, that burn year after year, destroying everything. They burn for tens of years, every day; they never go out.
He was asleep. His glowing red hand rested on my small flame of hair. I began to move. Having throw n himself into the furnace of my body, he too was fire now. I pressed his fingers of fire into me.
“I’m burning up,” he said, sweat running down his face.
I had begun to bleed during the night. He pushed his way through the thick flames of red, growing larger and larger by our union. I felt his tongue in m mouth, his lips against my lips in an exploding red kiss. We grew larger. I sighed. There was no controlling this. I le reached for me through flames, feeding himself once again into the open center of the excruciating heat, and the fire spread.
“Next Friday,” he said. “Meet me here—in this room,” and he looked at me as if he were looking at me for the first time.
I was sweating in my black coat out in the street. “Don’t leave me here alone,” I said.
“Next Friday,” he said. “Don’t forget.” He stepped away, afraid to catch onto me again and begin all over out there on the street. “Next Friday, here,” I said. As he walked away, the fire continued, burning on, slower but steadily, in this ungodly, unseasonable November.
“For this is wrong,” Rilke writes, “if anything is wrong:
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the inner freedom one can summon.
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
My mother never listened to the weather report and consequently was almost always dressed unsuitably for the ever-changing whims of the Connecticut climate. I can see her shivering in a thin navy-blue cloth jacket in November or sweating in April in her lined raincoat, her whole face flushed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she’d ask, shedding layers of sweaters, or, hunched over in another season, her arms clutching a manuscript against her chest in an attempt to ward off wind and cold, “Why?”
“But, Christine, I did,” my father would say, nearly inaudibly. It seemed to me that he suffered from my mother’s discomfort more than she did. To my father, I think, m mother’s problem of dressing was a symbol of all her suffering, and because of this he could hardly bear to witness these lapses in judgment.
“Why must she suffer so much?” he wondered day after endless day, night after sleepless night, as she typed. It moved him terribly to see my mother in the middle of January in a thin cotton blouse and cardigan sweater. He seemed wounded by it.
But I thought it was a good sign, a reassuring sign when mother knew she was dressed improperly. What I feared more than anything in the world was when she felt no weather at all—no cold, no heat, no rain—when she would walk through a rainstorm, come back drenched, and sit down to work at her typewriter, without changing her clothes or even wiping her brow; when she came in from a walk in the snow in her sandals, her feet bright red and numb, and she, completely unaware of them When she felt no weather, when weather did not matter, I knew it would not be long before the doctors would come and she would not be allowed out of bed. And so these days of complaining, of discomfort, of my mother questioning my father and Hetcher and me eased me in a strange way.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this terrible heat?” she would ask again and again, taking off a sweater, cocking her head and squinting slightly as if to say, “If you told me, then why can’t I remember?”
Her mind could not be trusted completely. It stopped, it skipped, it added, it forgot. It changed things.
“I did tell you, sweetheart,” my father whispered into her ear. He held her in his strong arms. She would not go mad, he said to himself. She would not.
A simple thing like dressing for the weather might have made mv mother feel more at home here, day to day, had she only somehow known how to listen to such things. She knew, though, that she only had so much energy and, considering the demanding nature of her mind, she could not afford to pay attention to everything, every conversation, every news broadcast. She knew how easily she tired. If she allowed herself to see and hear everything, she would not have survived, for everything to her was a challenge, imperfect,
asking to be transformed, rearranged, made over. But she would not allow it; above all my mother was a survivor.
The simple task of just looking at the world was problematic; just going to the grocery store or meeting a new friend of mine wore her out. “Sonia,” she’d say, looking at my new dark-eyed classmate. “Sonia,” she’d say, and, if she let it, her mind could wander around that one name for an entire afternoon.
She had to learn, and she did learn, when to look away. Not to would have meant to burn up, to be dissipated—or to go crazy. She would not go crazy, she said to herself. Psychic energy had to be preserved, carefully doled out, used for her work. Emotions had to be hoarded for the work. Attention to detail, mental acuity had to be saved, then focused. Select, my mother must have told herself, select and choose. Careful—be careful. Go slowly. I think I understood. She would survive; the weather was just one of the many things she had to put aside.
“Quiet,” my father said over and over through the years I was growing up. “Your mother needs quiet to work.” It was the only thing he ever asked of us. “Quiet,” he whispered, retreating into his soundproof room where his music played.
You tell me to think of the white at the end of the day on the stock market floor.
I like the way you put me to sleep.
I think of monuments. You whisper the names I want to hear:
Rachmaninoff
Shostakovich
Rimsky-Korsakov
Rach ma ni noff
Sho sta ko vich
Rim sky—Kor sa kov.
Looking up from our tangle of cat’s cradle, I noticed that Sonia’s brown eyes had turned the pale color of tea. The yellow flowers on the wallpaper in my bedroom were beginning to disappear as if they were being eaten off in some exquisite hunger. In the next room my father’s bare feet blanched. The world was losing its color. Walking to the window, I noticed a few leaves on the backyard tree had shed their green, not for the brilliant, momentary oranges and reds of autumn but for some lesser shade, a sort of gray, the mark of a more troubled, internal season, more permanent than other seasons, colder.
This was only the beginning. In the days to come, the world would continue to empty itself slowly of color until finally, by the time my mother was handing her suitcase to my father at the top of the stairs, I would barely be able to see her at all, she would be so lost in white. This happened many times through the years of my childhood. The lake would gray and flatten into a pale square. The red-winged blackbird flying across the blue sky would lose its shock of red, its feathers would fade, and the white sky would devour it.
I began to be able to detect these changes almost immediately, no matter how subtle they were at first. I felt lucky that I could foresee my mother’s departures so far in advance. With the first signs I would follow her more closely, sit nearer to her, watch her while she napped on the couch, etch her profile in my mind, hug her disappearing body as color drained from her lips and her blonde hair whitened. On these early days, her shadowy arm would curl around me like a wisp of smoke and she would whisper, “What is it, Vanessa?” But she knew well what it was.
Had I overheard telephone conversations, seen airplane or train tickets in advance, been privy to plans I had forgotten, or was it something else, something in my mother herself, some early retreat, a pulling back, a stepping away that made me aware that soon she’d be leaving again? I think I received my cue from some extreme inwardness in her, from the distant place she had already gone in preparation for her own departure, a place even beyond that place which was her normal domain. Yes, I was extremely sensitive to the timbre of my mother’s existence. I loved her so much that days in advance I could see her departure in the face of a friend.
When everything had become white, I knew the time had come for my mother to go to the closet, drag her leather suitcase across the room, and lift it to the bed. She would call me into the room then, and we would sit there for a moment staring into the white. Then she would begin.
“I just don’t know what to bring, Vanessa,” she would say. What to pack always seemed the outward struggle of a much deeper ambivalence for both of us. We sat on the bed and looked into empty space.
“Maybe I’ll pack nothing,” she said finally “Maybe I’ll give the Henrietta T. Putnam Lecture in the nude! What do you think?”
“Yes, we’ll only pack your hat,” I said.
“Perfect,” she said. “The fuchsia one with the feather.”
It is one of those moments frozen in my mind forever: the hat, tilted to the side, covers one eye. Her hair, pulled up, falls over one shoulder. She stands in her lacy underwear, puckers her lips, and then laughs hysterically, shivering almost, in anticipation of the windy lecture hall.
I would keep her with me. I would keep the sparkle in her blue eyes and put it back into the lake, back into the sky she was about to leave behind. I would keep her laugh, her intonation, her hat with the feather, her hair falling down her back—her hair was yellower in those days and longer. She must have been very young.
I remained through the years an almost-silent witness to my mother’s packing as I watched the mysterious rise and fall of hemlines on her lovely legs. I said very little, for language could only complicate the complicated feelings of my mother. She would sit back on the bed again and look at me and say, “I just don’t know what to take,” and soon she’d begin to cry in the white room. Holding her hand, I might then walk to her enormous closet with her and stand there looking at the bottoms of her dresses, and I too would begin to cry. Though I tried so hard at times, I would never be, as some children are capable of being, the grown-up my mother needed. I could not help thinking, through those years, that my friend Sonia would have been a better daughter altogether for my mother. Sonia, keeping the seasons straight and the occasion in mind, would have put together, from my mother’s huge assortment of clothing, outfits—one for each day she was to be away with a change of evening clothes for the nights. But not me. We would start by carefully picking and choosing, but by the end of the day we would have moved all the clothes from the closet onto the bed. We felt unselective. We could imagine needing just about anything. And my mother had so many clothes.
My mother’s attempts to stay fashionable were, I think, her one concession to life as other people know it. She worked hard not to feel out of place. We would diligently scrutinize the fashion magazines, Italian Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily, make obligatory trips to Saks and Henri Bendel, watch emaciated models walk down numerous runways. “Who writes this?” she would whisper to me exasperated, as some man with a microphone told us to “imagine you are in Bali and the sun is about to set.”
Fashion was frivolous in a way my mother never really could be. Despite her supreme effort, my mother was not good at dressing. Her heart was simply not in it, and yet, stubbornly, her whole life she insisted on keeping up with the fashions of the day and wearing them.
“Do you like these?” she’d ask tentatively, taking lizard shoes out of a striped shoebox. “Oh, they’re really quite ridiculous, aren’t they?” she laughed.
There was an urgency about her dressing. I think she believed that if she stayed current she would not get lost. If she kept one high-heeled foot in the material world, all would be fine.
I can remember thinking, after one of our many shopping sprees, as we walked down a busy street in New York, impeccably dressed, that we were misfits, and that no matter what we put on, we would never fit in. My mother must have felt that, too, but tried to douse that feeling with French cologne, to disguise it with a Christian Dior coat or a suit from the House of Chanel.
She always hated surprises, and it was some comfort to her, walking down the street, that nothing in the wide world of fashion could surprise us. When paper dresses came, we were well prepared. Fish swimming in earrings were nothing to us. And when a certain faction began dying its hair pink and green we were not fazed. My mother just smiled, pleased to be on top of the situation.
&nb
sp; But her multitude of clothes posed a tremendous problem when it came time to pack. She became distraught, unable to put things together. I could not help. To me, in my sorrow, each item looked like every other. I handed my mother the white dress, the white shoes, the white sweater, the white scarf, the white gloves. Did you know, she said to me, that in China white is the color of mourning? She must have seen white, too. I looked at the mountains of pale clothes on the bed. The Chinese are right, I thought, to make white the mourning color.
All those times sitting on her bed, buried under clothes, the suitcase overflowing, I found it easy to imagine that she would never come back again.
The last time I saw my mother she was waiting for me under the enormous clock in Grand Central Station where we met briefly, she on her way back from Maine and I on my way to college for the second semester. She did not see me as I approached her. She wore a large hat. Bewildered, she watched people pass her and stare. My mother could have worn anything and gotten away with it paper dresses and fish earrings, snakeskin gloves, lizard shoes, parachutes, parasols. What other people saw when they passed was a large, beautiful, overdressed woman. What I saw, getting closer to her, was my mother, so ill at ease with her surroundings that she had to arm herself with layers of clothes and jewelry and makeup for protection. Her bulging suitcases flanked her.
“Hi, Mom,” I said quietly, so as not to frighten her. “I’m sorry I’m late.” She smiled broadly.
She was not really seeing me. “You’re very nice,” she said.
“Mom. Oh, Mom.”
“Hmmm? What is it, honey? Vanessa?”
“Mom,” I said gently. “You don’t need all of this,” I said, as I slipped rings from her fingers, slowly undressing her. She looked at me as though she were a child, this big woman. She was completely absorbed in me and what I was saying. “You don’t need all this.” Her eyes did not leave my mouth as she waited for meaning to come. I put jewelry into her large pocketbook. I removed the glasses she was wearing; there was nothing wrong with her eyes.