Off-Island
Marlene Hauser
Copyright © 2017 Marlene Hauser
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Matador
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To my family, for everything.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
About the Author
Chapter One
At half past seven on the evening of August 21, Krista Bourne decided she had had enough. She abandoned the ballet barre and her outraged teacher, Madame Chevalier, who shouted after her.
“Miss Bourne, if you’d rather be out in the rain then of course you should go. I am tired of your lack of commitment! You are taking my time, the other dancers’ time, and what do you give in return? Nothing.”
Krista looked back over her shoulder at her twenty wide-eyed classmates. Their arms and legs, for once not rigorously placed en attitude, dangled like the limbs of marionettes before the strings were twitched. The puppeteer gestured for them to continue with a sweep of her silver-headed walking cane and stalked after her disobedient pupil.
“You are not a dancer,” she hissed. “You are always half somewhere else. Always.”
Krista nodded her head, aware there was some justice in this statement, and softly closed the door to the dressing room behind her. Madame Chevalier continued to speak undaunted.
“Now go, take the rest with you, and do not come back until you can bring me life. A full extension!” She beat the silver handle of her stick against the dressing-room door and waited for a response, a last gesture of defiance from the girl who had dared to walk out of her class without being dismissed. The only answer was silence. Madame abandoned Krista to her ingratitude and resumed her own place in front of the mirror.
Twenty soles brushed against the hardwood floor, toes pointed from the hip and held one count before brushing back. In the dressing room, Krista slipped the pins from her hair and allowed it to fall to her waist. She rummaged in the old flight bag she brought with her to every class for the cotton T-shirt and yoga pants she’d chosen to wear earlier in the afternoon, to combat the insufferable city heat. Tears rolled silently down her face. She disliked any attention directed at her, but this was the last time she would need to endure it. Really the last. She had been daydreaming at the barre, eyes turned to the skylight, watching the storm clouds massing overhead like half-wild animals, rearing and colliding with one another, dark and primordial, dwarfing the puny flashing marquee on the Gulf & Western building.
Madame Chevalier was right. Krista Bourne would rather smell rain, feel rain, taste rain, than stretch and discipline her reluctant body even one hour longer. Giddy from her own act of defiance, Krista dressed in a hurry, quickly brushing her hair and leaving it loose. Cool air rushed through the cotton clothing as she descended the steps from the fourth-floor studio. New York had been waiting for this thunderstorm since June. With her palm gliding lightly over the chipped banister, Krista secretly asked the storm to break when she was a block from home. Let me feel the swelling, the wind, the pre-storm. Lose myself in the El Greco blue. She tossed the flight bag over her shoulder, threw her blond hair back as if it were a mane, and stepped out in the long, turned-out stride of a dancer.
“Michael,” she said aloud, her words drowned out by the evening traffic, the tired horns, and quickened her step towards home, towards telling someone that things were changing. It all began last night with her dream.
She could not land. She was afraid to land, and yet it felt as if the choice were not really hers. She could not be flying under her own power, for she was bound, arms crossed at the heart, ankles shackled together, lips sealed. She was mute. In the distance was her mother, afraid to fly, and yet here she was, unable to land. Landing would mean taking form, taking color, taking shape. A personality. Landing was death, so she remained safe in her cocoon where every notion, every desire, was within conjuring distance. No law, no order, no others, only the motion pictures of a thousand different places and a thousand foreign names. A kaleidoscope of fireworks, the high-rolling rustle of beauty, the motion, color and light of insanity.
She stood upright, entombed; yet she seemed to fly invisible through the ages. Between sensory flights, she rested as pure concentrated energy, a beating heart, a steady pulse, housed in a canopic vessel in a dark chamber where dazzling, attenuated shards of light progressed slowly over the stone wall. The light frightened her. When she attempted to escape, to fly away, a wildly beating thing, the steady pulse rooted her to the vessel, to the chamber. The shards of light drew close. The closer they came, the clearer she could see her chamber, her crypt. But it was her heart she felt she must save from the light. If it were to shine on the vessel, penetrate the seal, she knew it would mean the end. Somehow it would change her forever. There would be no going back.
Then the light touched the vessel, cracked it… and she had been unable to scream. Michael woke her up, forcing her clenched arms away from her chest.
“Are you okay?”
“Egypt,” she was finally able to say, “I dreamed of Egypt.”
She did not mention the crypt-like room, the flight through time or the danger inherent in the light. She did not mention death. Michael said he could understand why she had dreamed of Egypt.
“You’re wrapped tighter than a mummy,” he said, and helped her unwind the sheets.
“My hero,” she laughed, and sought refuge against his warm chest.
*
Krista walked towards the subway station at 59th Street, shuddering as she recalled the dream. A falafel vendor lolled against his stand, the flimsy yellow-and-red umbrella still upraised defiantly against the gathering storm, a threadbare fringe driven horizontal by the wind. Everyone seemed to relish the knowledge of the upcoming storm. A sitar player, a young man with a crew cut, smiled at Krista as she approached. She noted the odds and ends in his wicker donation basket. As she passed, she unzipped her bag and tossed him the pink ballet slippers. He nodded and she laughed, thinking things we
re changing fast.
Descending on the escalator, Krista momentarily considered walking home, or else taking the bus, anything so she could stay above ground and watch the storm roll in. But the train won out. It was faster, and if Krista had to choose between her redwood deck and high-backed wicker chair, or a walk down Broadway to the Village in a downpour, she would opt for home, for nudity beneath a familiar blue beach towel, and her three cats purring happily on her lap. She wanted to watch the parched oak tree in the courtyard welcome the deluge.
The train seemed to take forever. Krista missed the express at 42nd Street because her thoughts were elsewhere. They were on Ilsa, her grandmother, and what she might think if Krista were to stop dancing forever. It was she who had inspired her granddaughter to dance, to take up ballet for exercise and discipline, but also to seek freedom in movement.
“Like Isadora Duncan, see?” she enthused as together they pored over a sheaf of watercolors of the famous dancer. “Express yourself,” Ilsa repeated and repeated.
Krista recalled many summer afternoons spent in Ilsa’s small study, or else in the studio, usually lying against her grandmother’s soft arm. It was she who discovered for the Bourne family that their youngest offspring had the odd habit of sleeping with her eyes open, especially after her father’s death. But asking Ilsa Bourne her opinion of this evening’s events was impossible. She had been dead for almost two years. Perhaps, Krista thought, her grandmother’s death and not going to the Island, Martha’s Vineyard, had made the heat these past two summers particularly unbearable. Krista sighed. She missed the woman who had always lived on the Island, no matter what the season, the woman who always seemed to have secrets and secret places, the woman whose iridescent paintings would never be seen by anyone so long as they remained in the garage, the storeroom and the boarded-up Island summer house. Her grandmother for some reason had never gone off-Island and, after she had died, it seemed wrong to remove the work she had accomplished there.
Krista bounded up the steps at the south end of the 14th Street subway stop. The sky, dark yet still slightly illuminated by the sun sliding to its rest beneath the horizon, reminded her of childhood nights when it was easy to believe the heavens were really one huge sapphire dome enclosing the captive earth. The rain began to fall. The wind blew in short gusts between bouts of near silence, strange on a city street. Krista stood for a few minutes at the corner of Greenwich and 12th Street. The theatre was closed, but the deli and the paper store were still open. In her plastic sandals she splashed like a child through the widening puddles, thinking about dinner and her mother preaching in the Midwest. Krista hoped Michael had already eaten.
The rain continued to pour as she turned onto Bank Street. The slender dancer hugged her bag to her chest as if it might offer some protection from the deluge, then held it high above her head, over her already soaked hair. She mounted the steps of the brownstone two at a time and leaned on the buzzer marked “Michael Parks”, over the buzzer marked “The Bourne Family”, and over the buzzer marked “Charles Bourne, Sr.” Michael buzzed her in from his apartment. Cosmos, the oldest and only male of Krista’s three cats, met her on the landing. The first thunderclap drowned out the sound of her steps on the stairwell, and she slipped past Michael’s closed door, heading for her own apartment.
The brownstone was once a single gracious residence. The Bourne family had occupied it for generations. It still belonged to her grandfather but now the building was divided into three separate apartments. Grandfather Bourne lived his quiet and somewhat mysterious life upstairs, except on the weekends when, until her death, he visited his wife, Ilsa, on the Island. His son’s widow and daughter lived in the middle apartment. And the first floor recently had been rented, at Grandfather’s suggestion, to Michael. No one had wondered at the old man’s offer. If it seemed an odd thing to offer living space to a granddaughter’s lover in his own home, and later to find him a position in the family firm, no one ever questioned Grandfather Bourne, who continued to come and go, in his strange, preoccupied way, mostly in the wee hours of the morning. From the patriarch of the Bourne family, nothing was unexpected, nothing was out of the ordinary.
Krista had her grandfather to thank for what she considered the most hideous name on any roster. Charles Bourne, in February of 1955, the month of Krista’s birth, had served as a member of the General Energy team that transformed graphite into diamond. Hence, her name. Helen Bourne, Krista’s mother, claimed she initially fought against it, then helplessly submitted to a hospital room full of well-wishing alchemists.
“I’m surprised,” she often said, “that instead of Crystal they didn’t name you Charcoal. I fought for Krista! Can you imagine being called Crystal, after a rock formation? That is what they wanted to call you – Crystal or Diamond. So enjoy Krista, and count your blessings.”
Helen Bourne also claimed, whenever the conversation came around to birth, particularly Krista’s, that she had wanted an abortion. She had not wanted to marry, not Charles Bourne, not anyone. If abortions had been legal then, she often told her daughter, if she had had the wherewithal to seek out an abortionist, she would have suffered anything. Instead she married and had the child, her only one. This Krista’s mother told her when she first menstruated, when she became able to give birth herself, and the story had been told to her many times since. But Helen Bourne often added affectionately, “Despite it all, you’re not half bad. Sometimes, I even like you.”
In her apartment, Krista disrobed, dropping her clothes in the middle of the living- room floor on the Persian carpet. She picked up Cosmos and turned the answering machine to playback. Her mother’s voice rasped, “It’s a fraud, Kris. They send you out here to sign books for one reason only – so they can’t be returned. I signed two hundred and fifty copies today. Can you imagine?
“Listen, Kris, tell Daddy Bourne I won’t be taking the Nova Scotia trip but it was kind of him to offer. Oh, and if you want to get out of the City, take the car. You take the trip instead. D.B. won’t mind.” She laughed. “D.B., as we all know, probably won’t notice the difference. The trip’s been extended. I won’t be back until mid-October. Any auditions?” The machine clicked and Helen’s voice was cut off.
Krista opened the French windows to the deck. She tied the drapes back, and in her blue beach towel sat in the high-backed chair with Christmas on one arm and Allegro on the other. Cosmos purred in her lap. The wind picked up, the downpour intensified, the temperature plummeted. Except for street and house lights, the night turned pitch-black. In the three high walls of the apartment blocks surrounding the courtyard and the oak tree, shades were lifted and drawn at random. Dark figures here and there stayed looking out, as Krista did, at the storm. The discomfort of the heat lifted, the City seemed to sigh with relief. Krista sat perfectly still, not even noticing the silhouette of a neighbor waving to her, sharing the chilly pleasure of the overdue summer storm. She stroked Cosmos. An onlooker might almost think her asleep with her eyes open, or, as Madame Chevalier had said, might suppose her half somewhere else.
Now go, take the rest with you. Krista remembered the stinging words and pondered where she might go. To Daddy’s ceiling? She closed her eyes. A full extension? She stretched out her legs, rotating the ankles, turning the leg out at the hip. She wanted to wake up… but then she wondered, from what?
At that moment, Krista experienced a hint of freedom – as if something had risen up from the cracked vessel she had seen in her dream. It moved, floated to the corner of the chamber where the light filtered in. It seemed to raise a long slender hand, pulling back a musty, heavy piece of canvas. Krista recognized her own hand. Behind the heavy curtain, she glimpsed the twilight from which she was being offered a star. She held her breath, clutched the cat close, feeling for its heart. There are so many stars, she thought, and then chose one.
She shivered. What a silly daydream. Wind buffeted the rain against the deck. The cats spra
ng away, running through the French doors. Krista returned to contemplating the star. What was that dream all about? Maybe nothing. She imagined a star breaking like water and herself stepping into the twilight, then dropping her hand, allowing the canvas to fall back behind her. Immediately, she found herself freezing.
“What do you want – to get pneumonia?” asked Michael, stepping onto the deck. He knelt down in front of Krista as he pulled the blue beach towel up around her shoulders.
“No,” she answered, startled. “I lost track. I was thinking about that dream I had last night.”
“Come to bed,” he said, “you can finish it tonight.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous,” he answered, stung by her dismissive tone.
“You are,” she said softly, refusing to fight.
“Why didn’t you come in downstairs?”
“Because I never sleep downstairs.”
“I asked you to, remember, last night?” Michael’s brown eyes were warm and pleading with her. “I feel awkward always sleeping in your old room, in your mother’s apartment – the nursery even. Why didn’t anyone paint over that ceiling after your father’s death?” he asked. “I hate it. It gives me the creeps. When you were a baby, a child, it might have been a good idea but…”
“Leave it, Michael. The ceiling looks good at night. It’s only by day that it looks bad, and who really looks at it then?”
“I do. I see it first thing, as soon as I wake up – the first thing.”
“Keep your eyes closed, then. It’s my bedroom. Always has been. And if you want to sleep with me, Mr. Parks…”
“And if I didn’t?” he answered playfully.
Krista turned her back, tossed her arms up. Michael tackled her from behind, picked her up, and carried her to the room he detested. As he gently threw her onto the bed, her blue towel slid from the satin comforter and onto the floor.
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