The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  And she, even in that time that was little more than an instant, held his head against her breast like a mother comforting a child, feeling his weight grow between her loins, his flesh reaching so deep into her, with an urgency that was like screaming, she thought he could if he so wished easily break her in two and, staring up open-eyed into the driving rain, she told herself that when this dream was done she would wake and find herself in Jean’s arms and together they would be safe again.

  five

  Mrs. Orlovski, mop in hand, red-and-white bandanna tied round her head, and dustcloth tucked neatly into the pocket of her white apron, continued with her cleaning when the lunch dishes were done.

  She went from room to room as a prospective but absentminded buyer might do while examining a house that was for sale. Often she would dust a bit in one room, move on to another, and an hour or two later return to the first room and finish whatever she had left undone there, never dusting the same piece twice in the same day.

  Now, as she moved from room to room, humming bits of old songs as she worked, she could hear the rain beating against the windows and she became conscious that the house was warm and dry and she thought how terrible it must be for people who do not have a house to live in. This thought made her pause a moment in her work. It seemed impossible to her that in our modern world, with so many conveniences, there should be people who did not even have houses to live in. She had never known anyone in this position, but she supposed that in countries like India or China there would probably be people like that and she took a moment out of her life to be very sorry for them before she picked up the song she had been humming and went on about her work.

  Mrs. Orlovski, though a widow, considered herself to be a fortunate woman. She had always, even as a child, thought her life very well ordered. There were certain things she might have wanted over the years, but not getting them had never intruded on the over-all feeling of happiness that had always served to calm her and to make her aware that her life was a life rather well lived, as she would put it to herself.

  As a child she could remember having hundreds of toys, though the only one she could remember specifically was a red-faced monkey who had one ear torn off by a little boy who had hollered one day that this wasn’t a real monkey at all and he would show her. He had torn the ear off and then had stood in the middle of the sun porch where they had been playing and had looked quite bewildered, holding the ear in his hand, almost as if by tearing it off he had become suddenly convinced that the monkey was real after all.

  As a young girl, Mrs. Orlovski of course had been much slimmer than she was now. Her main concern between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, she recalled, was to become a concert pianist, and she had always thought a good figure would be of help to her since even music critics can appreciate a woman’s figure. Her mother had paid an old Austrian by the name of Lubeck to give her lessons every Thursday afternoon. The fee was two dollars, but since Lubeck looked almost exactly like the bust of Franz Liszt that stood on the piano, it seemed reasonable enough, even though there were teachers who would take as little as seventy-five cents for a lesson.

  One Thursday when Lubeck did not come to the house and she had been kept sitting on the piano stool for almost an hour waiting for him, her mother had telephoned the rooming house where he stayed and the landlady told her quite flatly that Mr. Lubeck had shot himself in the head two nights ago. And that had been the end of her career as a concert pianist.

  When she started going out with boys (they seemed to have quite suddenly replaced the piano in her life), she had always thought she would one day meet a man from a foreign country, a tall man who would speak with a charming French or Italian accent. They would waltz—for that had become one of her favorite pastimes since she had given up the piano. And they would travel and see all the marvelous cities of the world. When, by the age of tweny-four, she did not meet even one man—tall or short—with a foreign accent, she began to believe that such men perhaps existed only in the movies or in the newspapers.

  But such disappointments had never lasted very long with Mrs. Orlovski. She was a woman too immersed in living her life to be sidetracked by anything as unimportant as not getting what she wanted at any particular moment. There were always other things to want, and that was the secret of her success—that she had come to know this at a very early age. If there were no men with foreign accents, then there were men without foreign accents. If there were no white houses on tall mountains, then there were apartments in cities or gray frame houses by the sea. The world was too full of wonders for anyone to believe it could ever be empty.

  As Mrs. Orlovski dusted a blue-and-red Chinese vase in the parlor, she thought how strange and even a bit funny it was that this vase had been to more places in the world than she had herself. This vase had been to China, had sailed over many seas, and now was in her hands being carefully dusted, and who knows where it would go to from here. As she set the vase back down on the mahogany table, Mrs. Orlovski wondered if vases and plates and such things knew where they were or where they had once been. She paused for several moments, wondering about this, and then she sighed one of her very deep sighs and moved on to another room.

  Perhaps because such questions were constantly popping into her mind, Mrs. Orlovski never let them remain there for very long. A moment or two at a time was all she had for philosophy and she thought it quite enough. The world was full of wise gentlemen who were always taking care of such important matters as philosophy, and the dusting did have to be done by someone.

  And so when she started to think of how grown-up her two children were now, she was not at all troubled by the thought, since she knew it would soon be gone. Her life had always gone running, even fleeing on ahead of her, so she was not so much living it as catching up with it and as soon as she caught up with Tuesday and gave it its proper shape with whatever she might have to say and remember about it, it could by that time be Thursday or Sunday morning, but at least Tuesday was in order, like jello slowly set in summer, and that was what was important. The children were like this too except that they were always running out even farther ahead of her than her own life did because they held in them, without knowing any part of it, the beginning of themselves which she did not know. She blamed the captain for this lack, but she did not let the blame fall hard on that dear man who always managed to carry so much of her catching-up on his shoulders or perhaps even in his heart.

  She did know, could realize it completely, even seeing it that far out in front of Tuesday, that soon they, the children, would both be quite adult and then they would want to leave her the same way she herself had left parents somewhere behind her, behind this same Tuesday or Sunday morning. She could not expect them to remain with her all their lives. Children stop being children. They move on. And yet she did have to admit to herself that when they did make this choice, believing they were taking leave of much more than they would in her, she would feel great joy if they could come back out of that distance in front of her and stay, let her go on telling them who they were the way she gave the good captain ships and herself what flesh or even God could not give her.

  Why, she could not even imagine living in this house alone, without them. They had, by her telling and by their own believing, become so much a part of all she was, of all she could imagine herself becoming. What is told, in time, does become truer than whatever might have been. What did doctors know, what could they know about what barren flesh can bear! They speak so simply, with the tight wisdom of men who must see whatever is directly in front of them. Their words say everything and yet are nothing. “It is impossible,” they say. And still she had drawn the days ahead into her, even without a man, and she had made these children hers. Doctors cannot know because they cannot feel the dream only flesh conjures and which no words describe. “There is nothing that can be done.” He said this. His gown was white and now so were his eyes. “But I felt this,” she said to him. “In here.” Her belly.
Her naked legs hung down over the table’s edge. He said, “I’m sorry.” She said, “For two months . . . ,” to tell him even of the blood which had stopped in her. And he said, “Yes. I know. That too can happen.” But what flesh can dream, God must know, God who does not have white eyes. So she prayed. And the children came. But she could never tell them of the doctor’s white eyes because the story, which is all that’s ever left of any world, is what finally becomes truth. God, if not the doctor, knows this. She prayed that hard, and after the children came she did not have to pray any longer because miracles are no more than secrets God tells us and when they are done, silence is all that ever must be said.

  But now would they really leave me, after so much? She asked herself this. But she did not try to answer her own question. She sighed once more and wiped the dust out of a black enamel ashtray and absently started up the stairs.

  She did not really plan to go to any particular room. She could hear the rain. When she came to the top of the stairs she told herself that she had not cleaned the rooms in several days and she could not remember just now what had kept her so busy during that time.

  So she walked slowly down the hallway, past framed landscapes on the dull walls, over the worn flowered carpet she had promised to replace for several seasons, and when she came to Miss Smith’s room, she opened the door without knocking.

  She was startled, but not thrown back as another might have been, by the cry she heard. All of their cries were the same and perhaps had existed only to prepare her for this moment, for this breathless sound of fear that cut the air slowly like a blade drawn across the air by a crippled hand. But those other cries too, pulled, led her forward while she kept having to catch up with her own life.

  What she saw now, however, was more than she had ever seen before, more than the sum of all the others. It told her what was over and done, what had never truly been possible.

  There in bed, both naked, were Miss Smith and (she paused here even before giving the image its name in her mind) Jean!

  She could not believe her eyes at first. She saw Miss Smith pull the sheet up with frantic speed to cover them both and she saw Jean’s blind eyes turn with strange slowness toward her. She heard herself say, “I thought you were out. I was sure I’d seen you go downstairs.” She said this and she might have stood there a hundred more years staring at them for all the difference it could make now. The duster raised itself, drawing her hand up, as if, regardless of what might ever happen in any room, it, the duster alone, knew truly what was to be done. She said, “Yes,” stepping back with the same smile that felt caked on her lips, turning then, and even as she pulled the door closed, she had to finish what was always said: “Isn’t that funny.”

  She didn’t even have to pause in the hall. She heard their voices, but they were as other voices she had heard behind other doors, life’s sense of repetition seeming to prepare us day by day for the worst that is always yet to come.

  She walked back down the stairs, thinking she would be safe in the kitchen. She always was. She was completely confused. She did not know what to think. What was behind these doors always blundered her into being still, kept her from having to chase after her own life, each cry like an anchor to hold against the coming swift wind. But not this. Jean was a man, she told herself. And the image she had of Miss Smith was now not of an old face, the skin dry, the eyes as lifeless as a handful of sand; it was of the young, beautiful woman she had seen so many times in the movies and so, amidst her confusion, she was rather pleased that Jean should have found himself such a magnificently beautiful woman—not only that, but one of the most famous women in the world as well. She was confused, but she was proud too.

  Then as she passed the tall living-room windows, she became acutely aware of the rain, as if a nerve had suddenly been exposed and she could hear the rain making a thunderous sound against the glass like the world itself trying to break into her house.

  She stood there watching the rain, and she remembered Jean telling her about how a very long time ago, before there were any living creatures on the earth, it had once rained for centuries without stopping. This thought startled her. The rain this day was certainly coming down in buckets. But could it ever again last that way for centuries?

  She smiled nervously and glanced back at the splattered windows again and somehow the knowledge she had, like a secret she alone knew, that this day’s rain would stop, masked her confusion with a vague feeling of pity and love for the children she knew now were no longer a part of her, not even a part of whatever story she would have to tell to make the remainder of her own life come true.

  six

  Outside in the rain, Tico Reeves stood up and laughed. He looked down at the torn white silk pants tangled around her ankle, already soiled with rain and sand. He laughed a raw bleak kind of laughter, a sound that was somehow part of a comic conspiracy with dark sky and wind and endless waves come hurrying without purpose to this shore.

  Tico Reeves, finished with this girl, knew what a damn blind dumb jackass Joe Tom was. “There is only one.”

  “You are so fucking much more than mad, you poor dumb bastard,” he might have said. “More than blind too. More than a fool.”

  He looked down at this girl, saw her thighs and belly and gold maiden hair soaked flat with rain, and she made no move to cover herself, her body poised in an attitude of abandon only a corpse washed up onto the beach would ever have the courage to display. Her eyes were closed, her hair matted down on her face, sand too splotched on bare skin, at her lips even which were slightly parted, her bare arms at her sides like the arms of a puppet waiting for strings to give them life.

  And this is all, said Tico Reeves to himself. This is the waiting and the longing and the world even crapping dry men so wise on their comfortable heels gossip and dream and snigger about until they go mad under the white sun.

  He grinned slowly, stretched shoulders back, letting himself feel the calm joy now well settled in his loins. He stood there for some time looking down at her, the white, now almost sand-colored pants, the perfect mystery of her body that seemed to have been so simply solved in the mere sound of laughter coming out of him like the true sperm of his passion.

  Oh, it had been fine all right, he told himself. Wild and fine and happy as anything. All this, but not so holy, old crazy man, nothing made of God, nothing to walk the damned earth a thousand times to find, something as simple and good as the taste of cold water on a hot day, nothing more.

  Tico Reeves lifted a hand slowly, but in a cocky way to say good day to the girl who did not see him. “Whatever your name is,” he said to her. Then he laughed again, turning from her, heading back into the direction out of which he had come.

  The wind roared, but he laughed louder than the wind. He laughed, shaking his head for the fool he had been, for the time, for the desire he had so cherished, for the faces of sky and clouds and perfect that way only in the broken brain of an idiot who would one day squat down beside the others under the white sun to be finally comfortable.

  Now, walking back to the town, Tico Reeves knew he would get good and drunk this night and then he would take the proud women, the sunlit girls, one by one, retracing his steps over the world, laughing where before he had wondered, seeing where before he had dreamed; he would gather up, like a rich harvest, all the smiles that had been offered him, the mouths opening like sleep itself, with that same deep and insatiable hunger, the mouths and eyes and fingertips and legs, soft bellies, breasts, and cunning secret places where the secret is told so easily and with such simple joy. He would hear them cry out against him and with no more than the grabbag tricks of his own body, he would turn those cries to laughter. He would feed the fool’s sad dreaming hunger of all their mouths with the finally dreamless truth of his own flesh.

  He would start with the dear sisters, with their wobbling ripe asses like fruit to be picked from green branches, perhaps even taking them on together, the three of them in one bed, a gr
eat tangle of limbs and laughter, and none of them would even know where one body ended and the next began. They would like that with their baby pink tits and their loveless mouths. Oh, but they would like that all right, Tico Reeves told himself now as he walked away laughing from the golden-haired girl.

  seven

  The old man sat cross-legged in the rain, not far from the water’s edge, and his jaws worked powerfully on the raw meat he stuffed into his mouth.

  He held the fat mongrel bone in both hands as he chewed and, with the rain streaming down his ruined face, he saw beasts and fishes in the close sky as if they had finally, with a dog’s agonized howling to speak the word of God, replaced the absurd stars.

  eight

  Miss Smith clutched the sheet to her breast long after Mrs. Orlovski had closed the door. Her fingers gripped it with the tentative but desperate hold of a young bird who has not yet learned to use its claws. Jean laughed when his mother was gone. She turned with shocked eyes to hear him laugh at such a time; the thought of madness briefly crossed her mind. “How much I’d give to have seen her face!” he said, speaking out of the laughter.

  Miss Smith did not answer him. She felt drenched in shame, as if someone had emptied a huge tank of freezing water over her naked body.