Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  “The lady needs to make her choice,” she finally said, giving Nate her customer smile, and leaning forward on her strong arms, “or I’m going to charge double for my time.”

  He laughed. “You better give me chocolate then,” said Nate.

  “Good choice,” she said without looking at me, turning to pluck a piece of wax paper from the box on the window shelf.

  Nate paid and we walked away. I pressed the tab back the way she had shown me and took a sip of the terrible coffee. Nate bit into his donut. “Plain weird,” he said, “and plain bad too. How’s the coffee?”

  “Okay,” I said, suddenly sickened by our stupid game. “Anyway, it was only sixty cents.”

  He aimed his donut for the trash can. “Wanna get breakfast?” he said.

  “No,” I said, for what felt like the first time in weeks. “I should probably really get to work.”

  “Does Robert even know what you’re doing in there?”

  “He seems to,” I said. “I think I can probably get it done in a couple of weeks.”

  Nate didn’t respond and we were both quiet. We hadn’t talked about when I might go back to Maine, or what would happen when I did. We parted ways at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Charles Street, and he gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek, as if he’d been reprimanded.

  There was something hideous, I thought that afternoon at the institute, about Galatea’s marble insides turning to flesh, to seething intestines and a squishy liver, inflating lungs and a pumping heart. The tales in Metamorphoses rarely ended happily; the process of transformation, of hands turning into claws and feathers sprouting on shoulders, was sometimes a punishment, and sometimes a reprieve. But mostly it was a compromise of some sort, a way to negotiate the chasm between desire and mortality, between human nature and human need.

  Galatea had in fact given birth. The progeny of the statue and her creator was Paphos, “upon whose fertile land myrrh grows alongside cinnamon and balsam,” and her grandson was the unfortunate Cinyras, whose daughter Myrrha had tragically betrayed him. It was a story I remembered well: Myrrha had had a throng of suitors vying for her hand, and was said to have been very beautiful. But when she was young, her father, Cinyras, who was a king, had allowed her to climb onto his lap while he sat on the throne. She had curled against his chest and she had looked out on the court while listening to his heart; she had seen the world through his eyes and fallen under his spell. She wanted nothing else than to be with him—to share his world and his heart as lovers do.

  She could not change her heart. She attempted suicide but was rescued by her loyal nurse, who begged to know what ailed her. When at last Myrrha told her the truth, her old nurse could think of no cure but fulfillment. As soon as the queen was away for a harvest festival, the nurse told the king that a girl in the kingdom was madly in love with him, and had offered to take the queen’s place in his bed if he consented to be blindfolded, so as to save her reputation. The king agreed readily enough, but as the nights with his young seductress wore on, he became more and more intent to know her identity. The moment he took off his blindfold and laid eyes on his daughter he went mad with rage, and chased her from his bed with his sword. She fled, wandering across the earth, begging the gods to relieve her of her life; finally they took pity on her and turned her to a myrrh tree, whose bark still oozes with her tears.

  I was supposed to be typing but instead I got up and went upstairs to my room. The last bouquet of lilies I had bought for drawing were wilted and hanging their heads, the petals ready to drop. The water in the vase was gone; they had begun to curl back thirstily, the ridges on their surfaces nearly transparent from their will to expand. I touched one with my finger and it dropped to the desk, the missing petal ruining the symmetry.

  “Nature has no dignity,” my father had said once, when I’d shown him our rose hips, crowded with the shining black backs of thousands of beetles. Even as we watched they plunged their greedy heads into fresh petals, piled lustily upon each other to multiply.

  I got out my sketchbook and began to draw the flower with the missing petal. Julie had taught me how to pluck petals from a daisy to see whether or not a boy loved you. “You have to picture someone,” she would say, looking at me as if she knew it was the kind of game I might not play right. I drew the flower, and then the stem, lazily following the next stem up to the next dying flower, already losing interest.

  After the old nurse saved Myrrha from her suicide, she knew Myrrha was sick with love, but at first she could not guess with whom. Myrrha could not say it outright, and it was not until she managed to moan “my mother is so lucky to have such a man for her husband” that the nurse understood. I had never felt my mother was lucky to have my father for a husband; I’d often wondered if he’d ever even loved her. He had a picture in his bedroom of the day they got married, standing in front of the Municipal Building in New York. A businessman on his way to work in a suit is just entering the frame behind them. My father looks like a paper doll in his tuxedo, as if he’d been pasted in. My mother is holding my father’s stiff arm, wearing a winter coat over her pale dress. Nothing indicates that the weather is not warm; the man entering the frame wears his jacket open, and the front of the building is full of sunlight. She seems, even then, as if she might walk into the fog and never come back.

  “Why is she wearing that coat?” I’d asked my father once, and he’d picked up the picture to look at it more closely, as if he had no idea what I was talking about.

  I had never blamed my father for not loving her, but she must have known it herself. Whether or not her death was an accident it had always been a consolation that he loved me more than he ever loved her. He would not have let me go.

  I got into my bed in my strange room with the dead flowers and curled up with my pillow. He loves me, I told myself, over and over again, as if I couldn’t picture him, alone in our house, moving from the kitchen to his desk, perfectly glad to have me gone.

  20

  Walter came into the library the next day with a letter from my father. I recognized the stationery the minute I saw the envelope, and when he handed it to me I couldn’t resist looking at it, reading my name in my father’s handwriting, “Institute for Classical Studies” written with pride.

  “How’s the little lovebird?” Walter said. “Robert says Nate’s been showing you all around the city.” I had forgotten it was Sunday, and Walter was at home. “Have you been to any museums?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said, shy.

  “Your father will kill us if we don’t get you to the Metropolitan. Totally worshipped the place, as far as I remember. And you ought to go to the Modern, which he might not approve of. I’m surprised Nate hasn’t taken you there. Doesn’t his sister work at a gallery?”

  I wanted to read the letter but I nodded as he went on about the exhibition there, and even asked him a few questions. When he finally left me alone I opened the letter immediately. It was written on one thick, starchy piece of notepaper, folded in half to fit the small square envelope.

  Dear Miranda,

  I hope you are well and enjoying the city. I must confess that I am unable to find my favorite pen—the green Parker—and wonder if you might have it. The nib happens to be one that, despite heavy use, still makes a thin, clean stroke.

  If you do have it, I hope you will use it to write to your dear father. But please do let me know, in any case, so that I don’t have to keep looking under the couch, and all around.

  Your father, Peter

  I read it over a few times—it was written in his large scrawl, and the two small paragraphs took up the entire page. He’d given me a pen for every one of my birthdays, and I had brought them only because I kept them in a box with the charcoal and erasers and soft pencils I used for drawing. I had forgotten how rare it was that my father ever did anything I didn’t expect—in fact he was always losing his pen, and inevitably he had left it in the kitchen, while he was making tea, or it had fallen betwe
en the couch cushions, where he’d fallen asleep.

  I slid the letter back into its envelope and looked calmly around the library, sensing how nothing had changed. He was home and I was here. I turned over the envelope to read my name again in his handwriting and smiled. I didn’t have his pen, and he knew it—he wanted a letter from me.

  I went outside. It was a beautiful day, with a hint of fall already brightening the air, and everyone on the street walked with their heads up, as if they were drinking it in. Ana wouldn’t be working on a Sunday; Nate, I knew, might be wondering where I was. Please do let me know, in any case, so that I don’t have to keep looking under the couch, and all around. I got an espresso from the boy with the nose ring, and after a while I took the subway up to the Museum of Modern Art, just for the sake of going somewhere. It was in midtown, near the row of swanky department stores on Fifth Avenue.

  The entrance to the museum was a wall of revolving doors, and as I stepped inside one of them there was a whoosh and then the screeching and scraping of the city stopped. There were no noisy groups of school children; even at the ticket booth museumgoers waited in mild-mannered lines. Everyone stood perfectly still on the escalator up to the exhibits, looking out the window at a large walled garden or at the perfectly still people riding down. No one asked for my ticket at the entrance to the Mondrian exhibit, but everyone stopped outside anyway, dutifully reading a dense text on the wall about the artist beside a photograph of him standing on a ladder in a laboratory coat, looking more like a scientist than a painter.

  As I wandered in to look at the withered still lifes and heavy landscapes I wondered if I should have come. People moved around the room in trancelike states, as if they’d forgotten about the city outside, the urgent traffic jams, the crowded restaurants, the clickety-clacking of their ladylike shoes. I felt out of place, the way I did in churches, or theaters, as if I didn’t know the rules. I stood in front of a messy blue vase with three heavy blossoms, trying to see it for what it was, and nearly gave up. But when I dragged myself into the next room the paintings changed.

  The muted colors became blurred and mixed; a network of black lines was all that was left of the trees from the room before. I leaned close to look at a title the way the man in front of me had done. Flowering Trees, it said. I stepped back and looked at the lines, the pinkish and bluish gray that filled them, and something dropped inside me, for there was the sky, and the apple-like blossoms. As I looked around the room at the other paintings I saw at once how this man had reorganized things. Brown, black, grays, and pinks intersected: Paris, 1917, said another painting, and there it was—a city absolutely, with windows and spires and walls, all troubled, all layered and exact.

  In the next room the gray vanished, and the canvases were gridded into black horizontal and vertical lines with red, blue, and yellow blocks of color. Sometimes a color—red, for instance—took up almost the whole canvas, and sometimes there were only black lines, moving and squaring off in different ways, making spaces of their own. Red, blues, and yellows blinked along the black lines in busy little trains. Each canvas was full of excitement but calibrated and complete, ending like a song—just when I was ready to move on to the next.

  I wandered dizzily back toward the first room, ready to do it all over again, starting with the trees. I used to have trouble drawing the way branches went up into the sky; I remembered my endless doodling in school, thinking it was impossible to make the branches look as thin as they did in real life, tapered but substantial. But he had done it all at once: the sky coming forward through the trees until the branches seemed like fault lines in the gray-blue. Everything had begun to divide out of its simplest self. The lines had straightened and the panes of sky squared until they were primary, the tree and the sky gone.

  By the last room straight black lines limned clean white canvases, balancing the colors of geometry. I looked at the other people, stopping at each canvas, looking at nothing but colors and lines. No one seemed to mind. In the place where tree and sky had shifted, only the elements were left—the lines without design, the colors without context. I thought of my careful record of each lily in my sketch pad; I thought of my whole careful life.

  What was I afraid of losing, anyway? There was no regret, nothing but hope in the obstinate boxes of color. It seemed easy, all of a sudden, to change everything. I was in a city, where people felt all this made sense. I could do anything I wanted. I walked against the flow of murmuring people, back to the room with the still lifes. Even then, of course, he had taken liberties. You could see the thick lines of paint, the places where the brush had spread, the color chosen despite the flower.

  My father, I thought, looking around again at the booming color in the last room, hated to lose things. He kept each draft I typed, even when only a line or two had changed, and piled them like a snowbank against the living room windows; he had his favorite sweaters, with the patches one on top of another; he had his favorite whiskey glass he rinsed each night. I’d always tried to help him keep things the way they were. After I’d lost his watch, I’d looked for it for years in the rocks at the edge of the cove. I imagined so many times the way it would look when I finally found it—the band eaten away, the face all rusted and still, the minute hand thin as an eyelash—that sometimes it seemed as if I had. I could almost believe we’d put it on a bed of clean cotton, in its own special box.

  But there was one thing he’d let go. Though I’d heard him say to Mr. Blackwell that he had “lost interest” in the priesthood, and that he had “lost touch” with his sister, I had never heard him say, the way other people did when politely describing our situation, that he had “lost” my mother when I was young. She’d passed away. He’d simply let her go, like the tree and the sky in the canvas, to build the life he had meant to, of pens and whiskey glasses and books, of solitude and sorrow and contentment.

  I walked downtown through the noise, past the blocky buildings, the tall glassy ones, the blinking lights and moving signs on Forty-second Street. I went back to the institute to watch the sky darken from my little room, the windows of the city light up, yellow, red, a grid of constellations—busy, alive, and all my own.

  21

  The next day I put on Julie’s dress and waited until Ana was about to close the cart. When I got to her she was throwing her empty boxes into her van. I saw her glance at me, though she didn’t say hello.

  “Do you have any coffee left?” I asked.

  “I’m packing up,” she said, turning a cooler of half-melted ice onto the street. We watched it funnel into a drain by the sidewalk. “How much do you want it?” she said, getting out a cigarette.

  “What?”

  “The coffee.”

  “Oh,” I laughed nervously. “I guess you’ve probably gotten to the bottom of the tank anyway.”

  “Probably,” she said, looking at me.

  I put my hands into the pocket of my dress. “I was just—I was just wondering what you’re doing after this.”

  She blew out a stream of smoke. “I’m going to the garage to drop off my cart,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be hanging out with your boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to say he’s not my boyfriend,” she said, smiling a little.

  “He’s not, really,” I stammered, vaguely telling myself it meant something that I hadn’t seen him for two days. He might even have been wondering where I was.

  She laughed, slamming the van doors shut. I watched her bend over to pick up the front of the cart by its trailer hitch and place it deftly on the van’s ball mount. “I can take you to a place where you can try café con leche,” she said, taking the cigarette out of her mouth to hold it again. “But we have to drop off the cart first.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The passenger seat was set up high and I felt like a child as I climbed up in my dress. It smelled deeply of cigarettes and stale cardboard. She walked slowly around the front of the van and got in, tak
ing the cardboard COFFEE VENDOR sign off the dashboard. The radio exploded into a loud, jangly rhythm as soon as she turned the key in the ignition, and she switched it off.

  The silence was terrible. I realized I’d had no idea what we would talk about, or where she might take me. She rolled down her window and moved out into the traffic. It was like coming away from a dock. She was looking at the traffic on both sides of her, her cigarette hand out the window. I rolled down my window too, and was glad for the wind rushing at me. I put out my hand to feel the cool air. “It’s like being in a boat,” I said, out loud.

  “I’ve never been in a boat,” she said, “even though I grew up on an island.”

  “I live on an island,” I said. “We don’t have a car.”

  “Doesn’t your island have roads?”

  “It’s mostly just rocks and trees. And our house. And a cove.”

  She glanced at me. “And you live there with your family?”

  “Just me and my father.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I think I’d kill my father if I had to live on a pile of rocks with him.”

  “We’re sort of used to it.”

  “You lived there all your life?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. It was a relief to be talking again.

  I held up her pack of cigarettes and she gave me an amused nod. As soon as I had one between my lips, she was holding her lighter for me, watching me inhale between glances at the traffic. There was an irony to these moments of sudden chivalry—I found them irresistible, and she knew it. She gave me a triumphant look.

  “How long have you lived in New York?” I asked.

  “We came over from Santo Domingo with my mom when we were kids,” she said. “I guess I was seven. My sister was ten.”