She didn’t move, but he thought that she shook her head.
“I don’t need anything like that,” she told him. “I do not desire your buttons or baubles, although I am sure that they are quite lovely.”
He thought that she smiled, but she did not actually do that, either.
“I don’t understand,” he confessed. He shifted from foot to foot. She really did smile then, but only in her eyes. He bit his lip and continued. “I thought...that you wanted something from me. In exchange for your help.”
“Oh, but I do.” Her skin was white, and her hair even whiter, but only just. When she smiled—if she smiled—her lips were disconcertingly red. The rest of the time they were only the palest of pink. He had the impression that something parasitic sucked the breath from those lips while she slept, but what could he do about it?
“Please tell me what you desire.”
“I want to be happy.”
“Then I will help you.”
She pulled a ceramic jar out of nowhere. It was the color of sky and looked cool to the touch. He flexed his fingers.
“This is the Container of Sorrows, Peter. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” He didn’t.
Her lips barely twitched but it was as if the snow melted and he tasted spring.
“This is how you will be happy. Tell me one of your sorrows. I will keep it here for you, and the burden from that particular sorrow will be no more.”
He felt stupid and stared at his shoes. They had holes in the toes.
“Do you...not wish happiness?”
Her voice was strangely brittle, as if she were trying not to cry. He was hurting her somehow, he decided, but that didn’t make any sense. He took a deep breath.
“I miss my mother,” he said, and the words fell from his mouth like vapor. The girl opened the jar, and the mist zipped inside. She closed the lid with a satisfying click.
“There,” she said, and her smile was real this time, genuine. “Don’t you feel better?”
He thought about his mother. Her warm brown hair, the apron that she used when she baked cupcakes. He thought about her more aggressively. The police telling his father that they had discovered a broken body. The funeral in a town without rain.
“I don’t feel sad,” he said in wonder, and the girl looked pleased. She kissed him, and he woke up.
Peter’s lips burned where she had touched him, and he kept his fingers pressed there for most of the day. When the boys razzed him about his poorly trimmed hair, he didn’t mind so much. When they taunted him about his mother being a whore who got what was coming to her, he was surprised to find that he didn’t care at all. He ate dinner silently and changed into his worn pajamas without being asked. He brushed his teeth and climbed into bed with an eagerness that would have been pitifully endearing if anyone had seen it.
Sleep came instantly, and there she was. She was wearing white flowers in her hair.
“Did you have those flowers yesterday?” he asked her.
Her cheeks flushed delicately. “No.”
Peter didn’t know what to say. “I had a better day at school than usual. Thank you.”
The girl again brought the smooth blue container out of thin air. “Tell me another sorrow, Peter. Tomorrow will be even better.”
He thought. “I’m tired of being called poor.”
The mist of words spiraled into the Container of Sorrows. He nodded his head once, and she nodded back in a very serious manner.
And thus it went. His sorrows disappeared. “I hate seeing dead birds. I wish that I had a friend. My father doesn’t notice me.”
The jar devoured his sorrows with an agreeable hunger. The pale girl’s lips turned up all of the time and her eyes began to sparkle. Peter grew more confident at school. He stood up straight. He looked people in the eye. He made friends.
He was almost happy.
On the last night that he went to her, something in the air had shifted. The atmosphere was holding its breath, and it was undeniable.
“Hey,” Peter said, leaning casually on the white desk. “There’s only one sorrow that I have left.”
“Only one?” asked the girl with something that sounded exquisitely close to hope. Her eyes shone. Her white hair and red lips were glossed with fragile expectation. She produced the Container of Sorrows and carefully removed its lid. Peter’s sorrows ghosted around inside, smelling of lavender and brokenness.
“Natalia Bench never looks at me at school.”
The vaporous sorrow swirled from his lips and settled into the jar. The girl’s white fingers didn’t move, so Peter put the lid back on for her.
He smiled. “Now I’ll be brave enough to talk to her tomorrow. Thank you very much, Girl of Sorrows. I am happy.”
The girl held the jar very close, and she looked up at Peter. Her lips were pale, strawberries buried under layers of ice. He was reminded of that feeling that he had once, long ago, where he thought that something supped from her lips at night. How frightened she must be. How alone.
How silly.
“Goodbye,” he said, and kissed her cheek. Had her touch once burned? She was ice under his skin. She was a corpse. Peter turned and walked away without looking back.
There was a girl. She sat at a white desk in a white room where she wept, clutching a container full of somebody else’s sorrows.
A PLACE OF BEAUTY
She left her husband because of him.
There was no scandal. There was no affair. One day she was struggling off of the subway, and she saw a man in a long coat, staring at the skyscrapers like a tourist. Only she’d seen him before at this same stop, and she realized that he lived here. He lived in the city, yet he still devoured the buildings and sidewalks and yes, even the graffiti as though he were starving. He loved this city, loved it insanely. He, as Edgar Allan Poe had so yearningly put it, “loved with a love that was more than love,” and this made her realize something: her husband did not love her. Oh, he had grown quite used to her, which isn’t the same thing, not at all. He’d most likely be upset when she left, and might miss the warm spots that her body created in the house where she slept and bathed. He might perk his ears listening for the sounds of her walking the floor at night, as she did quite often when she couldn’t sleep, but these things are so very different from love. His having grown comfortable with her presence wasn’t enough for her anymore.
“Oh, Gary,” she said that evening, after turning down the television. He promptly turned it back up, so she flipped the TV off. He turned it back on, so she flipped it off, unplugged it, and then pushed the entire thing to the floor with a mighty and quite delicious crash.
“Oh, Gary,” she said again, a shining goddess amidst the glass and wires of the shattered television, “this isn’t going to work, you see. I have grown very tired of you, and I don’t think that I love you anymore. And you, well, you never loved me in the first place, so why don’t we part amicably? Do stop fussing; I’ll purchase you a new television.”
Gary made sounds like he wanted her to stay, but after she crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Really? You do? Why?” he couldn’t think of a compelling reason.
“I like that you make food. I like having somebody to share my bed whenever I want. I like coming home to a clean house and I like the way that my laundry smells,” he said rather lamely.
She smiled then, and kissed him on his cheek, and said that almost all of these things could be accomplished with a good maid, and that all of them could be accomplished with a bad one. She wrote down the name of their fabric softener, put on her best hat, and picked up her suitcase.
“I’m leaving now, darling. I shall mail the divorce papers to you. Please be well, and know that I shall always think of you fondly.” And she left.
The next few months were full of telephone calls and apartment searches, and then life settled into its new, lovely routine. She took long baths with an almost unseemly amount of water and dried herself off wit
h towels that felt wickedly decadent.
One evening she stepped off of the subway, and saw that same man staring at the skyline. She stood beside him, shading her eyes with her gloved hand to see what he saw.
“This city, it’s so extraordinary,” he said to her. He didn’t pull his gaze from the brick buildings. “I could watch it all day. So much life, so much beauty.”
She saw it, felt the life of the city running through her veins in a way that she had never understood before. Being so close to a person in love...well, it must have a way of rubbing off on you, she thought.
“Look at that window there,” she said, and pointed. “I imagine that there is a lovely woman inside, playing the piano. Do you know why I think this? Look at the way the sun is hitting that particular window. It’s making rainbows there, but not on any of the others. That window is a place where magic happens.”
The man tilted his head for a second, pondering the window, and then he turned to look, really look at her.
She nodded her head once, for yes, this was just right, and then her heels tapped smartly away. She felt him watching her until she was out of sight.
MUSIC TO JUMP BY
The first time that I saw him, Vel had no bones. He lounged on the chair like he was melting into it, and I came to learn that was the way he always was. He watched the room with dark eyes that seemed half closed and lazy, but were really alert and bright. Not that anybody would know this.
Vel undraped himself from the chair and walked my way. I stood in the doorway, peering into the dark room, my eyes still adjusting to the lack of light.
“It’s okay to come inside,” he said, and reached out his hand.
I hesitantly took it, and his skeleton felt firm and strangely cool under his skin. And really, that’s where it all began.
—
Vel was my boyfriend’s roommate at the time, and even after the breakup, Vel and I remained close. He’d swing by at night, letting himself in through the upstairs window that never quite shut all of the way. This never bothered me. He was constantly burning his CDs, making eclectic new mixes for every occasion. Music for the Sea, for example, and Boring Songs for Lame Weddings. I especially loved his Music to Drive the Neighbors Mad mix; it was spectacularly loud with a gritty beat. Vel was a genius.
But he was unpredictable, and sometimes that made him scary.
“Vel,” I said, and shook his shoulder gently. He had fallen asleep on my bed while I was out getting groceries. He didn’t move.
“Vel!”
“Go away.”
His voice was very low and already sounded dangerous, but I didn’t have the patience to deal with it right then.
“You have to wake up.”
He raised his head and the look in his eyes made me take a step back, snatching my hand away.
“I said, go away.”
And I did. Simple as that. He gets like that sometimes, and it was far better just to back off instead of trying to bully him out of it. After making dinner, I tiptoed upstairs to see if he wanted any, but he had already left through the window. This didn’t surprise me.
One day he slipped a CD into my hands. He held it a little too long, a little too delicately, and the back of my head tingled. I knew there was something important about it.
“What’s this?” I asked, turning it over in my hands. There was no title, no table of contents. Except for the gentle way he ran his finger down the plastic before handing it over, it could have been just any blank CD in a generic case.
“Nothing special,” he said.
“You’re lying.”
He grinned, and it both warmed and chilled me at the same time.
“Keep a hold of it, will you?”
That night, I slipped it into my player and sat on the corner of my bed in the dark, hugging my pillow and listening to the music. It was even more eclectic than usual, but most of the songs were familiar. There were songs sung by children, and ones with heavy, driving beats. One that was tragically ethereal, and another in Russian that I had never heard before. He had dedicated a song to me once, slow and nonsensical, and that was on there as well. I turned it off and leaned back against the headboard. I just needed to think for a while. It was as if a single life was being played out on that CD. A soundtrack, perhaps. I wondered if it was the soundtrack to Vel.
The next day I stopped by his apartment.
“Tell me what this is,” I demanded, throwing the CD onto the couch.
He looked at it with his lazy eyes, and then directly at my face.
“It’s a CD.”
“Obviously. Tell me what you made it for.” I was nervous, and being nervous made me angry. I shoved my hands into my pockets so he wouldn’t see them shaking.
He noticed this, then shrugged his shoulders and lolled his head over the back of the couch. He stared at the ceiling for a long time. A fly buzzed past his ear, but he didn’t even blink.
“Vel. Don’t ignore me.”
His sigh was gentle, but I heard the exasperation and the weariness in it.
“It’s not for anything, okay? It’s just to...enjoy. So enjoy it.”
Without looking, he scooped up the CD and flung it back at me. I couldn’t catch it on time. The case opened and the CD spilled out, hitting the floor with a sound that reminded me of broken eggs and car crashes. I fell to my knees, picking the disc up and running my fingers over the new, raw scratches. I felt strangely close to crying.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” I asked. I bit my lip. “I kind of wondered if you had made it to be the soundtrack of your life. And then I wondered why you would feel the need to do that.” I couldn’t look directly at him, and shifted my gaze to somewhere off to his left.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him grin. “The soundtrack of my life, huh? I like that. If only I could be so lucky.”
He seemed a bit happier after that, but only barely. Happiness for Vel was that elusive thing that never quite came to pass. He told me once that he was content with the shadows of other people’s happiness. That was why he hung out with me, I think. There were enough shadows to go around.
But he started disappearing more often. He’d drive his car to the top of the cliffs, sitting on the hood and staring at the ocean. It was a pretty dangerous area, really, and had been fenced off a long time ago, but the fences had long since been torn down by the local kids.
I used to go with him, every now and then, but lately I had the feeling that my company wouldn’t be tolerated, let alone appreciated. I’d just watch Vel stare down at the thrashing water, and I didn’t want to do that. It was like watching his soul slip away, and not being able to do anything about it. A soul is a soft, indefinable thing, but the feeling of it sliding through your fingertips is unmistakable. I feared this.
I think he knew it. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and that was what really frightened me. He couldn’t make himself stay, not any more than I could. Each time that I saw him now, I unconsciously clenched my fists, somehow hoping to hold his presence around as long as possible. I saw it in the way his empty eyes traveled over my face and hair and then toward the sky. He was already disappearing.
—
“Come out to the cliffs,” he said. “And bring the CD.”
I tossed his mix in the passenger side of my truck and drove up the winding path to his spot. The sun would be going down soon. The thought felt ominous.
Vel was where I knew he would be, cross legged on the hood of his car. He barely glanced my way when he heard my footsteps, but that small sign of greeting was enough.
“Put it in, would you?”
I slid into the driver’s side and fed the CD into the player. I turned the volume up, and hopped on the hood next to Vel.
The music poured out around us, and Vel closed his eyes and leaned back.
“Let’s just listen for a while,” he said.
It was hard to breathe. I leaned back on the windshield next to him, and we both st
ared at the sky, the pink-orange of sunset streaking across the clouds. Vel reached for my hand, and I held it tightly. His fingers were relaxed and cool.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked, pulling me off of the hood.
There was something terrifying about this dance. He held me too close, and I stared wildly over his shoulder while he hummed, dragging me around through the sharp rocks and pieces of old seashells. The driving beat of his CD changed to something young and light, and then to something painfully ancient and angry. The inappropriateness of the music made the dance seem even more bizarre.
He dipped me once, and I realized just how close we were to the edge.
“Vel, stop it!” I pulled back, but he wouldn’t release me from his arms. I didn’t think that I wanted him to, anyway. I tried to imagine myself as something tall and stable for him, but I felt how wispy my spirit really was.
“Please,” I pleaded. I felt my eyes burn. “Please, let’s back away from the edge.”
He didn’t move, just hummed with the CD. His eyes were seeing far beyond me now. I felt my hands fall loosely at my sides. It was like I couldn’t control them.
“Look at me. Look at me!”
He finally focused on my mouth, concentrating on what I was saying. I enunciated as clearly as I could.
“I don’t want to watch you jump.”
His smile was warm, and made it all the way up to his eyes. He put his hand on my face and started waltzing me around again. I wasn’t nearly as clumsy this time.
“You could come with me, you know.”
He didn’t miss a step as he said it, just swung me around and spun me under his arm. The music was playing a wild, broken tune that reminded me of Old Norse battles.
“I...I don’t think I want to.”
“But we’re meant to be together, you and I.” Vel swayed his head with the music, and suddenly I felt like twirling, so I did. His smile was more beautiful than the stars. “Nobody understands me like you do.” The surreal quality of it all was making me light headed. Look at us, I thought. Waltzing to The Mickey Mouse Club on these cliffs. Just look.
Beautiful Sorrows Page 5