by J. D. Landis
When I feel her arms begin to loosen their grip on my sides and her hands on my burning back, I hold her all the more tightly myself, for fear that I will be embracing nothing but decomposing air and the very sight of her will be taken from my eyes. But even as she twists and slides away from me, her right hand journeys down my back and around my waist and finds my own right hand and knits them both together as she bends for her package and then starts to walk and pulls me deeper into home.
“Let’s go lie down,” she says, as if there’s any doubt where we are headed. “But first … do we have any champagne?”
“Of course.”
“Is it cold?”
“I believe there’s one bottle.”
“The green one with the etching?”
“No. But it’s a nonvintage from the same producer.”
“Great. You go open it. Then bring it to bed. I’ll meet you there.”
If it were possible to open a champagne bottle with one hand, I’d insist she stay with me. When her hand leaves mine, I wonder if we’ll ever touch again.
“So what did you do while I was gone?” she says as she walks away. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she chatters. “I did call you but of course you didn’t answer. How come you don’t have any music on? Oh, my gosh, were you playing the violin? I can’t believe—”
The cork explodes from the bottle in the same moment she screams my name. My hand is awash in prickly foam by the time I reach her.
She is sitting on the bed much as I imagine I had been, fully clothed, fully conscious, volumes of her diary cracked open and asleep between her legs.
“Did you read it?”
Her voice is husky. So I clear my own before answering. “Yes.”
Each of us seems to be waiting for the other to speak.
Finally she can bear it no longer and asks like some writer who calls his editor six weeks after handing over his lifework, “So what did you think?”
“Do you really want to know?” I ask, imagining myself into the role but at the same time flattered that she would even ask.
“Do I really want to know!” She reaches out to pull me down next to her. But I prefer to stand. I even move around to the end of the bed so I can talk to her as I did when I told her of Gerald Duckworth’s violation of little Virginia Stephen.
“There are no facts,” I proclaim, “only interpretations, so you mustn’t take what I say as truth. Consider it merely elucidation. In that spirit, allow me to tell you that while I am proud of how you succeeded in getting every name correct from our drunken, wonderful first-anniversary dinner at Bouley and the Latin too except for Nuptias, Pepys spelled it P-e-p-y-s, not, as it sounds and as I suppose they would spell it on one of your Howdy Doody cartoon shows, P-e-e-p-s. And, hello yourself … you were not spelling philogynist correctly—the second o should be a y. You also have no concept of how to punctuate end parentheses or how to use single quotation marks. Not to mention question marks, though I am willing to concede a strange logic in your avoidance of them. I could actually hear your voice as I was reading your words, and I realize you have a way of asking a question that is as much statement as question. It’s very much like a question that contains its own answer. But most people will not appreciate such subtlety, if that’s what it is. And heaven help you if you want to publish these, for then you’ll surely be required to temper your punctuational anarchy. Though I should think it would be worth such compromise, given the commercial value of your confessions, not that I know much about such things—commercial literature, I mean. As for the difference between ingenuously and disingenuously, it’s the difference between innocence and guilt. One more thing—you really should not use the variant spelling of vise when you describe being entered from behind. And before I forget—”
She has risen on her knees, crushing her diaries in the process as she moves toward me upon them, reminding me of Cosima on hers as she had approached my ingenuous member. But the reason I have stopped talking is not her attack but her laughter, which keeps either of us from being heard until finally, with her arms around my neck, she takes a deep breath and says, “Maybe you really fucking are a born diaskeuast.”
I pretend to be aghast, to have my father’s accusation repeated thus, but the fact is I’m rather proud of myself. There are worse things to be born, I have come to realize, than a diaskeuast, particularly for those of us who are forced to admit that for all our love of the art of language, we are not artists, only, as it turns out, interpreters.
“Now what is it,” she says, her lips at my ears, “that you didn’t want to forget?”
“To ask you what I should call you now.”
“How about Mommy.” There’s a perfect example. She says something in the form of a question that I feel quite comfortable in absorbing without a question mark.
“I meant, shall I call you Clara or, now that I know your given name, Carla?”
She hooks her hands into my lapels and pulls me down with her onto the bed. “Johnny,” she breathes into me, “I’m pregnant!”
3 A.M.
We dance. She has gone to her closet and thrown down her dress and underwear and put on her nightgown. On her way to me she chooses the music, and, as John Coltrane begins “Like Someone in Love,” she enters me, my arms, my skin, my brain. The music fills the world, and we are alone in it. We dance as one must dance—we dance away over ourselves.
This is how we celebrate, not with sex or champagne. Given her blessed condition, I am wary of the former, though she tells me it is only the lateness of the hour that keeps her from dispelling my fear, and will not permit the latter, not to her or, because we are married and must thus share sacrifice as well as God’s beneficence, myself.
She is my queen of angels, queen of confessors, queen of virgins. There was snow upon the hills of Aspasia, but how was I to know? And what does it matter now? I have never wanted her more. Or less.
And what am I to her?
“You are my grave,” she answers in acknowledgment that I have endured in the triumph of the sacred kartería of Epictetus, both quoting her diaries and providing herself transition into what she’s no doubt been dying to ask: “Why did you read them?”
I tell her the truth: “Because when I looked in your datebook you had left a blank for tonight. I thought you were gone forever.”
Rather than accuse me of invading her privacy—of which there is none in marriage, secrets and lies notwithstanding—she holds me all the more tightly as we dance.
Or perhaps she is thinking not of me now but of the life that grows within her.
“I was afraid to write down where I was going. If I wasn’t pregnant I didn’t want to look there and see his name and be reminded.”
“Whose name?”
“My lover’s.”
I begin to laugh so hard I stop dancing. My feet adhere to the floor as the rest of me quivers joyfully. She tries to maintain a raunchy composure but cannot and laughs too at her own wicked joke.
When she’s able to speak again, and we’re able to dance, she says, “Dr. Leslie was so happy for me he paid for everything. Not the appointment, I mean. The food and the wine. He made me eat cervelle. He said it would make the baby smart. I told him you’re my cervelle.”
“Does that mean you want to eat me?” I ask and marvel at how she’s taught me how to talk and freed my tongue.
“Any time. Any place.”
She leads me to the bed. But it’s not me that gets unwrapped. It’s the package she’d arrived with.
“Help me,” she says, and we open it together.
It’s the Broken Star/Carpenter’s Wheel quilt that she’d shown me on the day we met.
“I went to the shop after dinner to get this. I had to repair it. It took longer than I thought it would. That’s why I was so late. Do you remember this quilt?”
“Of course. I also read about it.” I nod toward the volumes of her diary still strewn around us on the bed.
“I’ve bee
n saving it for this.”
“For what?”
“For when we’d make a child. For when we knew we’d be together forever.”
I know what she means. When you marry and have a child, your blood is joined eternally. It is the only resurrection.
“Help me spread it out.” She pushes all her notebooks to the floor. There’s a violence that makes me sense she’ll never write in them again.
When the Broken Star is over the Double Wedding Ring, she climbs in between them. I undress and join her. I hold her in my arms.
Libro secondo.
There is nothing more to say, or do.
But as I’m finally ending my pannychous vigil and am embracing with eternal gratitude the irenic contours of marital slumber, I hear her ecstatically drowsy voice: “Oh, I forgot to tell you, Johnny … there’s a bike from Take A Wok chained up downstairs … whoever delivered your food must have forgotten it … I suppose they’ll come to get it in the morning …”
We sleep.
Labyrinth
It’s 5:15 in the morning and I just got woken up by a dream that was so strange I can’t go back to sleep even though I slept only 2 hours and I’m supposed to open the shop at 10. Maybe I won’t open today. I’m thinking of closing the shop anyway. I’m thinking of staying home with Johnny and the baby. I want us all to live like Johnny.
Anyway I’m exhausted but I’m also ecstatic so maybe it was my excitement that woke me up so early and not the dream. But I definitely had the dream. I didn’t imagine it. In it I was sleeping just the way I was sleeping. So maybe it was a dream about dreaming. I was in our bed and suddenly there was a man standing over me. He was Chinese from what I could see and was young and kind of good looking and dressed like a waiter with little glasses on the end of his nose. He was looking down at me holding a violin and a violin bow. Then he bent over and put the violin and the bow between me and Johnny. And he walked away through the loft and out the door. And when I woke up the violin and the bow were actually there!
I must have had the dream because I saw the empty violin case when I came home and never got a chance to find out from Johnny what it was doing there. Johnny must have gotten up and brought it into bed. Maybe he’ll teach the baby how to play it. I keep thinking about names: Wilhelm if it’s a boy. If it’s a girl I don’t know: Maria Barbara, Anna, Sarabande but called Sara, or maybe even Carla now that Johnny knows everything.
Published by 1995
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING.
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New York, New York 10014
© 1995 by J. D. Landis. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-772-2