“How did it happen?” I ask, my hands entwined with yours.
You shake your head, and I let it pass. I won’t pry too deep and break this spell. You’ve come back to me, and that’s all I could want.
In the slanting golden light of afternoon, we make love, our first time as husband and wife. Your back arches, and you shiver in my arms, moaning once. It’s a cry of pleasure, I assume, of gratefulness for how I saved you, how I coaxed you back from nothingness.
Our naked limbs curve together in a half moon, and we fall asleep.
For hours, I dream of disjointed women likes the ones on your canvases, and I dream of words too, of a mantra panted with avid desperation. You’re mine, you’re mine, I won’t let you go or wither or burn, I’ll save you. I’ll protect you.
But I can’t protect you, not from yourself.
I awaken alone at midnight in a snarl of still-damp sheets, the stench of barbequed flesh creeping through the stone façade of the cottage. You’re outside again and already alight. My feet a tangle of briars beneath me, I stagger from the bedroom, but like last night, I cannot reach you in time.
The last flames die out, and I collapse on the lawn. You’re ash and smoke and sorrow in my arms. It’s in this moment that I understand your moan in bed was not grateful.
It was nothing more than a death rattle.
***
After our first date on the ice, you were my own personal ghost—in my bed one evening and gone for weeks after. A bohemian lifestyle, you called it, but whenever you’d turn up at my door in the middle of the night, I knew it was because the overpriced hostel kicked you out for nonpayment, or you woke up on your friend’s futon after a party to discover a strange man pawing at you.
“Do you ever plan on finding somewhere you can settle down?” I tried not to sound too hopeful, tried not to let on that I wanted you there with me, in my house, in my bed.
“Maybe someday.”
You curled into me and closed your eyes. Tucked against my chest, you looked unreal, a meteor in the night that flares and dissipates. In the dark, I liked to tether myself to you, two fingers coiled around your wrist or the palm of my hand on your bare thigh. Anything to connect my body to yours, to bind us together, to keep you from disappearing like melt-ed snow in spring.
You opened your eyes and smiled. “The way you hold me,” you said, your gaze bright as wildfire, “it’s like I’m falling, but you’ve already caught me.”
“Always,” I said, and pressed my fingers a little deeper into your flesh until I felt the gentle throb in your veins.
We went to warehouse parties together, and gallery openings that weren’t in ice storms, ones that were well attended with people who trilled your name and bought up your work like you’d never decorate another canvas. Everywhere we went, I lagged behind you like a lost child. You were the star, and I was the shadow.
I never knew why you picked me. You could have had anybody. All the boys salivated after you, but you shooed them off like they were red ants invading a summer picnic.
“Nuisances,” you said, and pulled me closer. “I don’t want them. I want you.”
You kissed me, and everything cascaded away except the two of us.
We were dating three months when I took you home to meet my family. Everybody loved you. Even my mother, who never liked my girlfriends, especially the pretty ones, pinched my arm after dinner and whispered, “Hold on to that one. She’s a keeper.”
It was Easter Sunday. On the television, a fluffy-headed Moses parted the Red Sea, and at the table, my father won his third straight game of Scrabble. You laughed and blushed and said all the right things, and by the time my mother covered the leftover scalloped potatoes in tin foil and waved goodbye to us at the back door, I loved you so much it made my stomach whirl.
Halfway home on the highway, I gripped the wheel tighter. “Did you have a nice time?” I asked stupidly, because I could think of nothing else to say.
You smiled, and took my hand. “You’re everything I thought you were,” you said, and I didn’t know if that was a compliment or an insult. Perhaps I was too normal for you, too banal, or maybe that was what you liked about me, how different I was from you. Maybe that was why you picked me. I bit down hard to keep myself from asking, but the question escaped my lips anyhow. “Would you like to move in with me?”
You hesitated, the word thick as honey on your tongue.
“Yes,” you said.
It was the first time you ever lied to me.
***
I can never reach you before you burn, but I can always coax you back. You’ve retreated to ash a thousand times now, and I’ve saved you from the void each night, but it’s never enough.
The leaves overhead are red and new. It is always summer here, and it is always our honeymoon. A wedding night that never ends. We live this day over and over.
“Until we get it right,” you say, and I hate you a little for it, I hate you for suggesting that what I’ve done isn’t right. Should I bury your remains and leave you to the afterlife? How is that love?
The midnight blaze disintegrates you faster each time, so that even when I’m looking right at you, I’ve never seen you strike a match. I’ve searched the property—every closet, every corner—for the gasoline that ignites you, but nothing’s here.
Again tonight, you burn anew, brilliant and luscious, your flames the color of a ripe tangerine. I run to you, and when I don’t make it, I sob, as though this is the first time I’ve lost you. It always feels like the first time.
My throat raw, I call out your name, and you return.
In the chilled bathwater, your fingers prune, and the leftover ash swirls like a vortex around you. I massage the lavender soap into your belly, and the skin reddens and chafes.
“Why are you doing this?” I gag up the words, and my hands go numb, but I scrub on, polishing away the remnants of your soot and self-hatred.
“Because I can’t help it.”
You dry your hair and slide back into your wedding dress. Although you brought a dozen frocks and tank tops and high-waisted shorts, you wear nothing except the gown that reminds me of regret.
I track you through the house, your silhouette always a half-step ahead of me. “Let’s go to the general store today.”
“Why?” You’re in the kitchen on your tiptoes, reaching into the tallest cupboard.
I lean against the doorway to steady my shaking. “Maybe someone there could help us.”
You laugh, and the sharp, sad sound is like a dying nightingale. “Fine.”
Before we leave, you pull six bags of black tea from the top shelf and drop them into a pitcher filled with slightly yellowed water from the faucet.
I lock the front door behind us, and you set the pitcher on the front step in the sun.
The only trail out of here curves into a forest canopy, and the deep mud of the path seeps up around your satin heels and squishes beneath your toes.
You shake your head and sigh. “We don’t belong here.”
My stomach twists. This wasn’t your choice for a honeymoon. You would have preferred Madrid or Paris or even the kitsch charm of Niagara Falls. But I wanted somewhere for us to escape, somewhere for us to be together, just you and me, so I booked us the remotest cabin I could find, a place with one Greyhound stop and no other way in or out. The bus won’t return for a week, and since tomorrow never comes here, we’re stranded.
We leave thick footprints behind us as we wind around the trail into a clearing. Below, our cottage sits drowsing in a distant hollow.
I stare down at it. “It looks so strange from faraway.”
“Everything is different with distance,” you say, and keep moving.
Around a sharp bend, the general store comes into view. This is the only place within a day’s walk, the sole fragment of civilization we can reach before you burn again. The rusted bell over the door jingles, and a ring of grim-faced men glances up lazily at us as we shuffle insi
de. We’ve come here a hundred times already, trying to find a way out, but these men never seem to remember us. Perhaps they remember nothing at all. Maybe their days here have always been identical, an indistinguishable blur of nothing conversation and runny tobacco juice spat into old Coca-Cola bottles.
You disappear down an aisle filled with bulk herbs, dried and neatly packaged. The sweep of your dress curls behind you like the photonegative of a shadow.
One of the men squints after you. “Newlyweds, huh?”
I nod, though it’s no longer true. You and I have spent years as a married couple now. Years, or only one night.
I gnaw the inside of my cheek and ask the same question I always ask. “Could we get a ride out of here?”
The man behind the counter whistles. “Sorry,” he says, his lips bunched up in the shape of a distorted rosebud. “Truck’s broken down.”
Another man grunts. “All the trucks are broken down.”
I heave in, and the air tastes of nicotine and abandoned dreams. “Do you maybe have a phone then?”
“Nope, son. Sorry about that.”
My stomach twists again. This is the answer I expect, but it always hurts, the hopelessness of this place, how we’ve gotten ourselves in but can’t get out again.
You purchase an ounce of cloves and lavender flowers, and pay for them in loose change.
“Thank you,” you say to the men, and they brighten and watch us leave, a longing in their eyes. Maybe you’re the reflection of the girl they loved once, the girl that slipped away from them, the one they can’t forget.
Outside the store, you take my hand, and we walk back in silence.
At the cottage, the sun has warmed the pitcher and made us tea for the afternoon.
***
When you moved in, you brought almost nothing with you, just a paisley hand-me-down suitcase stuffed with secondhand dresses and silly keepsakes. A locket with no key or photo or secret inside. Your first paintbrush, too withered and tangled and loved to use again. A picture of a woman, your mother probably, though when I asked you once who she was, you shrugged and said, “Nobody.” I never asked again.
We eschewed the fancy parties and the cocktail bars, and stayed in to make Thai food and watch reruns of I Love Lucy and Burns and Allen. You never complained. This was a nice life, a sturdy life, with no pawing guests and space enough for you to work. I was sure this was what you wanted.
You set up in the spare bedroom at a canvas half the size of the wall. From the kitchen, I heard the rustling of magazines and the snick-snack of scissors disassembling the glossy pages, but whenever I peeked in at you, you covered the canvas with a king-sized white sheet.
“How’s your next show coming?” I asked.
“Okay,” you said without inflection. Another lie.
I decided you needed the house to feel like your own. So I hired a contractor who tore the wallpaper from every room and slathered paint in the palette you requested. Lemon yellows and burgundies and apricots.
“Anything you want,” I said, “it’s yours.”
“Thank you.” You pulled me close and kissed me, and for a moment, I tasted ice. I tasted our first date, our joy, our past. I’m sure you tasted it, too.
But it didn’t help. Your work remained stalled, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would stir from bed and discover you wandering through the gaping doorways of the house, like a specter without chains, without anything to weigh you down and steady you in this unfamiliar place.
“What can I do?” I asked, but you just shook your head.
There was no reason for you to be unhappy. You had everything a person could desire. This should have been enough. But I could have proffered you a kingdom and still not made you smile.
Most nights, I cooked alone, burning curries and over-steaming rice and staring at your plate, sullen and cold, across the dinner table.
Sometimes, you joined me. Those nights were almost worse, the two of us chewing our overdone steak and sipping our boxed Zinfandel and wishing we could cut through the silence that clotted thick as mud between us.
“Our life isn’t so bad,” I said one evening. “There are other women who would be grateful for this.”
Instantly, I wanted to reach into the space between us and crush the words from existence. But it was too late. With you, I was always too late.
You speared a sprig of wilted asparagus and said nothing. You didn’t speak through the rest of dinner, or afterwards. In bed that night, you turned away from me, your body smoldering to the touch, the comforter kicked to the floor. It wasn’t until the next morning over thin coffee and thinner conversation that you met my gaze, your wildfire eyes dull and distant.
“If you’re not happy,” you said, “why don’t you find yourself one of those other women and leave me alone?”
You could have slit open my eye with a razor and hurt me less. “I am happy,” I said.
We didn’t speak again for three days. At last, I came into your room where you stared at the sheet tugged over the canvas.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“So am I.” Your hands quivering, you reached toward me as if I wasn’t real, as if I were a stranger. Then you unfastened my shirt, one button at a time, not teasing now, but with a hand that could do nothing else, a hand desperate to remember. This was our only way to solve anything. Your every touch became an apology. So did mine.
Afterwards, you curled into me, and I pretended it would be okay. I could fix us. I could fix you. But all I could manage was to bury us deeper into this life.
On our anniversary, I kneeled before you with a black velvet box and a ring that cost six months’ salary.
“Sure,” you said without looking at me. “I’ll marry you.”
***
We sit together on the front step of the cottage and sip sun tea from smudged glasses.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” You gulp down another heavy mouthful of dark liquid. “We were better off before we met.”
“Maybe,” I say, and despise myself for admitting it. “But now I can’t be happy without you.”
You exhale a rueful laugh. “That’s the trick of love, isn’t it?”
You say nothing else, but it’s easy to guess what you mean. The trick is how love rearranges your life, how it cleaves you in two, so that there’s the before and there’s the after, two halves irreconcilable from the other. Your new life becomes something you can no longer recognize, but your old life is gone too.
And in this forgotten land far from home, we have nothing except each other. Not that we even have that.
The gossamer edges of night creep closer like long tendrils of smoke.
I clutch my glass so tight it warps in my hand. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” you say, but the melancholy in your voice says that’s not always enough.
I close my eyes and breathe in the scents of lace and leaves and earth.
Tonight will be different.
Tonight, this will end.
***
We would be happy. That was what I promised myself. Down to the last square of white lace, I planned us a fairy tale wedding, forgetting that some fairy tales end with armless girls and eyes pecked out by hungry crows.
Before we left home for the chapel, I sneaked into the spare room where you kept your canvas. You were already in the car, so with a careful hand, I peeled back the white sheet.
My chest tightened, and the world spiraled around me like a broken top. The figures no longer had large eyes and jagged hips. They no longer looked like girls at all. They were gaunt towers, misshapen and vile, like pillars of salt scorched with flames.
Grimacing, I turned away and locked the door behind me.
At a pristine altar, we said our vows and our “I do’s,” and I removed your veil to reveal a face I hardly recognized. It didn’t matter. I kissed you anyhow. A kiss would be enough, I told myself, so long as it was real, so long as I meant it. Love
breaks the spell, after all. It transforms the beast back into royalty. It coaxes the apple-poisoned princess from her coffin of glass and slumber. Love would be enough. It had to be enough.
At the reception, you did not blush or smile or dine on a slice of red velvet cake, a flavor that I thought was your favorite. You didn’t dance either, not even when the DJ spun every sappy song for inspiration.
“Too tired,” you said, and I huddled beside you holding your hand as the guests imbibed and caroused and wished us all the best.
But there would be no best, no good tidings, no happily ever after. With your veil tucked behind your ears, you vanished before my eyes, retreating into the places I could not reach you, into a darkness as encompassing as death itself.
And no one could sense it but me. All they saw was a bride in an unspoiled dress who tipped up her chin and tossed her bouquet and clapped for the unlucky girl who caught it.
One by one, the pink-faced guests departed, leftover cake tucked in bow-wrapped favor boxes under their arms. We waved goodbye to them and pretended not to sense the weight of our mistake bearing down on us like a thousand quarry stones.
The midnight tickets quivered in my hand as I slung our luggage over my shoulder. “The bus will be here soon. Don’t you want to change?”
“I’m fine,” you said, and fidgeted in your lace and satin, the seams clenched in your hands like a nervous child at Sunday school.
I didn’t argue. There was nothing left for us to say.
When the wheezing bus arrived, I clasped your hand and helped you up the stairs, and together, we took the long ride to eternity.
***
I wake in the dark. The iced tea pitcher is empty, and I’m alone. On the step next to me, you left behind your glass, a red kiss imprinted on the rim.
A humid gust swallows me up, and I know beyond reason, it’s almost midnight. Our last midnight.
At the edges of the lawn, you wander, your body already glowing with a preternatural warmth. My bones heavy beneath my flesh, I go to you. Nothing stops me this time. That’s because I’ve finally realized it. I can’t save you. I can’t protect you.
And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe Page 16