The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  “The children always played in it,” she said. “It was a great ship.”

  “I’ve seen it. From the road.”

  She walked back to the stairs, and when she turned to him the years had come back into her eyes and this made him wonder if she was truly able to believe all her own stories: he had always thought she could. He felt a surge (not common in him) of pity for the possibility that perhaps she had never truly been able to believe all the fantastic lies he’d always thought she lived by.

  She faced him in silence before she said, “Yes. That’s what I’ll do. They’ve all known her such a long time, you know.”

  He said, “Of course.”

  “I can just tell them he was a sailor.” She paused again. He waited for her to continue, though he told himself he could speak her words as well as she could by this time. Then she let the smile come to her lips the way a parent might permit a child some small bit of mischief. And she said, “. . . that he was a sailor who drowned in a terrible storm off the coast of . . .” He could tell the door had somehow been opened only by the cool air blowing across his face. And it was almost this cool air smelling of April and the sea, this wind, that spoke the rest of her words for her. She said, “. . . of . . . well, Africa.” And this was to be the final truth of it. It was done. He felt relieved. He nodded, put his hat on. “Yes, of course,” she added, pleased now with herself. “Africa.”

  He said, “See that she eats.”

  He knew that no answer was needed as he walked across the wide porch into the sun’s cold light. And he himself was amused as he thought: And why not Africa?

  chapter 10

  one

  ALIGHT RAIN had fallen all during the night, had colored the early sky pale green as stained glass broken by clouds. But the morning was clear, warm, filled with the raucous hungry old crying of gulls. Clouds were gone and the green color was again only the sea.

  Mrs. Orlovski sat at the kitchen table wearing a blue dress with white at the collar. She was going over her annual list with the ease of a rabbit or doe moving through its natural habitat.

  “Chicken . . . thirty-nine cents,” she muttered carefully as she wrote the word “chicken” and then the corresponding figures in their separate columns.

  Steak was eighty-three cents a pound. As she wrote this down, she made a note in her mind that it had gone up three cents over last year’s price and she would just check around at some of the other markets to be sure. She had been dealing with Mr. Kirkland for almost fifteen years and she had always been satisfied with his meats and vegetables, but every year when she made out her price list for the summer budget, she would note how the price of string beans had gone up a cent or two and then milk was two cents more than it had been the previous year, and she would always tell herself that she was going to check around at the other markets in town, but she never did. (At the beginning of one summer she had remarked to Sygen that with prices constantly going up the way they did, it was truly a wonder the roses still grew for nothing. And that was as far as she ever went about trying to fathom this vast economic puzzle.)

  All the rooms were clean. The linens were properly stored. The floors were waxed. The beds were made, the windows washed. There were fresh flowers in the four vases in the dining room, newly starched curtains on all the windows. The freezer was full, as were all the pantry closets. The crocuses to the north side of the house were beginning to come up very nicely and so were the roses out back.

  Everything was in excellent order. She had even had the piano tuned and had bought a new needle for the phonograph.

  Mrs. Orlovski had hired Midge Bostock again as her maid. Midge was a tiny Polish girl from town whose father was a drunkard, and so Midge, having to care for him as she did, had never married and for the last seven summers had worked for Mrs. Orlovski, making up the rooms, serving the meals, and helping a bit in the kitchen. Mrs. Orlovski certainly did not approve of Midge’s father (not so much because of his drinking as for the unspeakably foul language he would constantly use when drunk), but Midge herself was a hard-working, quiet girl and Mrs. Orlovski always felt a little sorry for her, since she looked very much like a mouse, with just that sort of pointed small face, and she had a voice that squeaked in exactly the same way a mouse would if he could actually speak.

  When Mrs. Orlovski was finished with her list, she checked the pantry and the freezer for the third time. The old excitement of summer was catching hold on her once again. It always restored her to a sense of well-being, no matter how terrible any particular winter had been. The summers were her stage and the bright waiting eyes of her guests extinguished whatever darkness might have accumulated over the frozen days and nights that were now as completely gone as rain dried upon black rocks at the sea’s edge. She checked her pantry, linen closet, every room with the care of a magician making sure before an important performance that all his tricks are in working order. As she went from room to room, she paused here and there to smile to herself, heave one of her very deep sighs and think how time does fly, with summer here once more and the guests arriving any day now. And she thought this like the same magician who is fooled by one of his own tricks into believing magic is real.

  As she returned from her third trip to the pantry, Mrs. Orlovski wiped the perspiration from under her eyes with the edge of her white apron and as she did, she noted not that summer had come, but that the winter was really over. This always made her glad.

  But when she realized that winter was over, she also became aware that her winter guest, Miss Smith, was gone, vanished, she thought, as if she had never really been there at all. And this caused Mrs. Orlovski to pause again in her work.

  She sat down at the kitchen table, but this time pushed her price list and pencil to one side.

  It seemed so difficult to believe that she had actually had one of the most famous movie stars in the entire world living with her all through the winter. She knew very well that when she would tell this story to her summer guests they would not believe her. She had told so many stories over the years and never once had she ever felt that whoever was listening to her did not believe her. And, she confided to herself, there were a few stories to which she had added a detail here or there, much in the same way that a good cook will always add a touch of this or that to most any recipe. Why, she could even conceive of God Himself scattering certain lies among the truths of the world for no better reason than that those lies were beautiful.

  When Miss Smith had left, Mrs. Orlovski had ridden all the way into town with her, giving the excuse she had shopping to do. “And I always do enjoy a nice ride.” And all during the journey in Mr. Potter’s taxi, she had told Miss Smith what a pleasure it had been to have had her as a guest. She told Miss Smith how she was planning to have the entire house painted and all the rooms redone. “Why, you won’t even recognize the place next year,” Mrs. Orlovski had said with a bright smile. But when Miss Smith merely gazed out the car window at the sea without answering, the smile fell apart on Mrs. Orlovski’s face and she was silent for the remainder of the trip.

  Now, however, after looking back over everything, she felt quite certain Miss Smith would return next winter. The silence had meant nothing; she was a great artist and artists are given, not even to silence, but to dreaming, which explained the incident to her completely. Mrs. Orlovski told herself that she and Miss Smith actually had become friends. She recalled the day they had all played charades in the parlor. This made her smile again. They had shared such good times.

  But then there was the day she had opened the door to Miss Smith’s room and had seen Jean in bed with her. The memory trembled her flesh as light through windows fell warm over her folded hands. She had never said a word of this to anyone. Nights she had lain awake, mystified, the mystery made into terror by not even knowing why she should be mystified. She had fallen asleep on those nights not long before dawn and quick dreams were filled with a blurred foreboding, like audible light to hear it speak, to t
ell of what lay sleepless in her heart’s fear. But to remember the telling was only to remember light.

  There was the night too when she had found Sygen lying out in the rain, like a slain beast left behind in some wood by the careless hunter. Her body was naked, her dress torn, her eyes stared off hideously into some distance in a way that had made her seem absolutely mad.

  Sitting at her kitchen table now, these memories confused Mrs. Orlovski. They seemed to permeate, cloud over every other memory she had, and they seemed to be telling her that all her life had been a road leading only to this, to these two moments.

  This idea, of course, puzzled her. Why would all of a person’s life lead only to questions like these which could not be answered? It did not seem at all reasonable to her. Life certainly was not meant to be a trick played on those who lived it; she was quite sure of this. Just as summer came every year, so too was life itself constant and simple really, not always happy, of course, but the tragedies that happened to anyone were all on the list along with the joys, just as there was chicken and steak and string beans and apples on her own shopping list.

  Now, sitting there, bound in her lonely anguish by mere phantom chains, by nothing even to be made real by what she could tell of it later, she suffered the premonition that perhaps she had been wrong, greatly wrong about her own life, that she had been speaking a language no one else in the world understood and all the time their smiles, so wan now in memory, had been the polite meaningless smiles of travelers in a foreign land and their replies had been no more than phrases remembered by sound, not meaning, out of small language handbooks that are stuffed by happy tourists into pockets or a purse.

  She heard cawing of gulls and saw sunlight and knew the season’s name. But at the center of this reality lay fragments of what she could not now even call a dream. People scattered like ashes among these fragments had faces worn only as masks before desire, life this savage carnival where tigers wear men’s faces and these faces try to tell themselves the mask they wear is the image of God Himself.

  Her life whirled and blundered thus before her eyes. Days were washed up against her heart like tidal debris. Laughter was turned to screaming as if the nakedness of angels was all the devil feared. Tales told a hundred times shaped now, finally, the calendar of her love, charts for dreams to follow past the waking day; for there is this tide of dreams governed by no moon, but by what only hearts can know in their despair of the impossible. On this tide only the black sky rides to shore, for no ship can weather it. On this tide, wounds and wonder glitter, cold shiny creatures of the deep, fearing no fisherman’s net and no god’s curse.

  She saw so much in the blurred light of days and could give no name to any of it. If she had failed in her life, at least she had not failed in love; she knew this much. The rest could go without answer. But was there an answer to be found? It would be as if she had asked the table or the chairs or the yellow pencil or the moon to tell her some secret they alone could ever understand.

  She felt this and more and had no real words with which to fasten down these feelings, and so they whirled through and about her a long time on this afternoon.

  It was all, this dread look backward over her own life, like gazing out to sea, trying to find there . . . well, what? she asked herself. A ship? A floating shred of silk on the water? Land? A swimmer coming from a great distance? The sun? Stars? A white bird? Or perhaps only the green end of a wave that came rolling in slowly out of the distance to break finally like a whisper upon the empty beach.

  Mrs. Orlovski, shaking time and memories off with a sigh as some mongrel dog shakes rain from his matted hide, got up from the table and came back to this simple world by picking up a fallen dishrag from the floor, folding it slowly, placing it down on the sinkboard that was empty of dishes and dry.

  She heaved one more sigh, then went over the list again, checked freezer and pantry and then the vases in the dining room to see that the flowers—such bright and fine colors!— were properly arranged.

  And it was while she was arranging several crocuses in one of the vases that she paused to admit to herself that even though she could not understand these things that had happened so suddenly and without warning, they would not really alter the fact that her life so far had been a most enjoyable one and there was no reason why it should not continue in this manner.

  Life, Mrs. Orlovski told herself to finish off the matter, was not a question to be answered. And in the same bargain, it was not an answer to any question. And with this, she left her speculations of that afternoon much in the same way and with the same feeling of satisfaction as when she left a room she had just cleaned, quite sure that everything was in order.

  Because the infant will be born, she said, as if to sum up all her feelings, all her days, washrags, freezers, summers, everything. The words filled her like warm wind, like leaves that barely move on a summer’s night and yet can be heard at the very core of sleep. The infant would be born. She’d have a grandchild to care for. She too knew of the day when seated naked on a white table she had given the world back to shadows that were thought to be made of truth. She had never cast that day out of her with any lie or story. But the child, the infant would. Blood, like grand rivers, dissolves for a lifetime into mere streams that run hidden through rock under sunlight, past days and deliverance, to emerge on another life, in open air under knowing stars, to emerge and run wild again past green shapes of earth back to the sea.

  She could sit and smile now. She could touch her full bosom, nod to herself, say the words over and over like the spell needed to open the rocks so the river will run again.

  She would be a grandmother, with flesh come to life this way, starting, herself, all over again. Life was not drying up under any sun. Years did not matter, could not be counted or guessed or even named. She had heard others, her guests, the white-haired wheezing ones complain of their lives being done, coming to such blunt ends, and she had seen terror rise in their eyes like terrible suns come to burn all life from the earth again. But her life was not coming to any such end under any such terrible sun. Why she would be getting up, weary only with joy, in the night again to quiet the wailing babe. She would change his, or her, diapers, prepare the formula, watch him grow, begin to speak, laugh, play, walk, wonder, and even scream when she put him down into the sea just as Jean and Sygen had screamed when the waves had washed over them for the first time.

  Mrs. Orlovski went to the back door. She stepped outside. The sun was bright, teeming with life down out of the golden sky so you could grab handfuls of it out of the warm air. She had to squint when she gazed out at the green impossible distance of the sea.

  She really should get outside a bit more, she told herself. But then there was always something to do around the house and especially now that the summer guests were on their way.

  She stood there a few moments, thinking how beautiful the sea was. Why, the waves that were now rolling in toward shore right here might once have touched . . . well, Africa, she told herself, since whenever she thought of any foreign place, it always would turn out to be Africa.

  But what was much more important than any continent or even than the sea itself was the knowledge Mrs. Orlovski held safely now, finally in her heart, that her children would never leave her. All morning long, and for days now, she had tried to fill her mind with other thoughts because she did not think it right for any mother to want her children to remain with her. But now it was as if the sea itself had unlocked this secret place in her to let her smile and admit to herself quite openly that she was glad they would never leave, that this life they shared, like players of a secret game, would go on and on, a story with no end, a river to break open many rocks, to find many seas.

  And as she turned back into the kitchen with a sigh, Mrs. Orlovski wondered if the infant would look anything like the late captain, with his wild eyes and the sound of his laughter that was like the wind and the hunger of his mouth upon her that had made every moment
of her life a feast to come to bearing love as one bears gifts only to the gods.

  two

  Sygen watched Jean’s golden head rise up out of the green waves, then disappear as he kept swimming farther and farther out to sea. She had never seen him out this far. For more than a week, each day he had gone farther than he had ever gone before. At night she would want to say how he was in danger, going that far out. But she said nothing. It was as if the very fate that bound them now sealed her lips. She asked him what he had done during the day and he, in his turn, asked her. They were such silly words. And as either spoke, the other did not really listen, only needing the words to be said. Before, in that old time that seemed to her part of an impossible past, they had never had this need, not even for the mere saying of the words, because they had always been together, it seemed, for every minute of the day; and so whatever one had done, the other had done also, if not in actual body, then in even more actual spirit. Whenever he had gone swimming out this way in those old days, she had always felt that somehow he carried her with him, she was there too, knowing the sea and him together in that way. But she stood alone now. For the week and after that, ever since she had told him of the night in the rain, of the child, and had seen the horror fill the blind eyes with a corrupt kind of vision as if blindness itself could go blind, each of them had gone a separate way so that when they finally did come together again, the coming together was from a greater distance and so perhaps reached, for this reason, to a greater depth.

  The coming together now was changed in more ways than depth alone can explain. Neither spoke of it. She had been afraid in the beginning. It had been a game and now was not a game. It had been simply joy and now was something more than joy. He came to her in the dark as if to say now we must both be blind. Where before they had played gently together, they had become savage and secret and each time both their bodies revealed more and more, one to the other, an urgency to passion now, a curious searching, as if amidst ruins, for some secret that would free them from this new, unexpected dark; having fled their old world that was without time, they now had to endure that fear of time which gives passion its burning edge, its awful intimation of the eternal lie.