Under My Skin

by Alison Jameson

  He kept the picture in his mind as he left the city on Route 95 North to Providence in Rhode Island. It was 245 miles and it would take him five hours with one stop for coffee and gas. He hoped that this stop would be in Barnstable and that it would be at three in the afternoon and after that he would take Exit 20 for 1–195 East in Providence and then continue deeper and further east to Cape Cod.

  Now, in mid-September, when the New England leaves would soon lose their red fever and begin to shrivel up and give in, he preferred the freeway and to only imagine the cottage and the warm summer sea of old. He had no illusions about winter there either but it was the memory of summer that prevented him from thinking about his Manhattan loft and its advanced thermostats – and from turning around again.

  He had always felt safe at the cottage but three years ago he had ploughed $30,000 into it and now there was a new boiler, proper insulation, security alarms, fitted shutters, and everything that would warm the impractical and hopelessly romantic holiday home. He remembered the old stories about the cruel winters there too and people who had died in houses banked up with ice and snow, and sailors and lighthouse keepers who had frozen to death or drowned. He also remembered reading about this in the warm library in Wellfleet when the sun shone from the bluest American sky and it was hot and the idea of death and cold and drowning seemed impossible to the boy.

  But it was to New England he went now. Ashamed of his retreat but less ashamed than afraid. He worried that he might have a breakdown and went here now to make something as he had promised – and to be alone. As he drove he had to beat back a worry that for some reason he would get there and the cottage would be gone. That the sea would have risen up in its highest possible tide and covered the shore and crept up over the sand dunes and back into the meadows and ponds to wipe out his home.

  He leaned against his car as he drank bitter black coffee from a paper cup. He leaned and watched as people walked forward into the autumn wind to begin their working day. How welcome it was, a place where people had no affectation. ‘They take you as you come,’ he said to himself. And around him the shop windows were almost bare and the handwritten chalk signs were like something from another century now. Everything arranged for honesty and openness, rather than display.

  He told himself to rest from driving but three mouthfuls of coffee and he was back in the car and driving away. He suddenly needed to get there before the sun disappeared. And all around him the first raggy leaves were falling and he wanted the colours of autumn to hurry themselves and give way to something simple and more pure, like snow. He hoped the house would be covered in it, and anyone looking for him – and here he grinned at the thought of it – would have to be extremely determined and armed with an ice pick and travel by snowplough.

  Wellfleet had not changed at all over the years and he found himself warm and smiling at the dashboard because Mr Huckstable who owned the hardware store was standing inside the window and putting a log on the stove. If Glassman had not been hurrying he would have liked to park and run inside and embrace him, just for still being there.

  The Congregational church was still there as he remembered it, with the steeple clock that chimed the hours in eight bells, according to ship’s time. He followed the signs for Newcomb Hollow although he did not need them and eventually, after more than five hours, he turned off the engine and took a deep breath and said, ‘Home.’ The dog was still there. He could see his head over the long grass that had come up in the yard. There were no leaves on the trees and there was a sharp salted wind whipping up from the beach when he opened the car door – but the dog made from stone whom Glassman and his mother named ‘The Invincible Dog’ was still there, barking at evil spirits or, as Glassman thought then, ‘baying at the moon’.

  He had left things as if he had expected to arrive here at the end of summer, worried about illness and cold. The barn was full of driftwood and coal for the stove. There were maple, ash and sycamore logs piled high to the roof and the new shiny boiler gave an easy click and buzz and came on.

  He lifted the dustsheets one by one and remembered everything – here was the old table they had always used in the kitchen; it was so well worn now that the corners were soft and round. Here was the old stove, still black and shining, which he could occasionally use, and under another cover, the ice-cream parlour chairs. And in the pantry, the ceramic tins he had labelled ‘Organic’ and ‘Non-disposable’ waste. He was neater in Wellfleet. He was somehow more well behaved and he had a conscience as if Wellfleet made him a better man. He would shower as soon as he got out of bed. He would eat better food. He would exercise every day by walking on the beach. If he was to recover, ever, it would be in Wellfleet, and he promised himself that he would on his first day there.

  Glassman unpacked slowly and cleaned away dust as he moved. The house began to warm up and he opened the door out into the barn again. He had known that some day he would work here and after he made his first simple meal of cornbread and cheese and a bottle of Heineken, he set up the diamond burrs under the skylight there.

  Tomorrow the crates would be delivered and the next day he would begin to work. He did not know yet what he would make as he hid in Wellfleet but he told himself that he would sleep eight hours every night. That he would keep a journal. That he would eat fresh organic food bought at the Saturday market. That he would walk for hours on the beach and he would fill his lungs with the freshest of air. That he would not think about New York or Matilda or any other woman until he reclaimed his body and won back his strength.

  He knew he would not always use the bedroom at the top of the white-painted stairs and that there would be nights when he would leave his shoes on the first step and take a newspaper and then fold himself into the little cot low down and near the stove.

  He knew that some days he would feel the cold regardless of his new boiler and that his stomach would reject any kind of food and that his courage would desert him and that on days like that he would not want to climb the stairs.

  He would make chicken soup and eat it with parsley and in the mornings he would eat oatmeal and drink hot chocolate and he would drive into Wellfleet in the hope of some sort of chat. And when the weather became warmer again, he would do something he loved; he would take his boat and paddle through Gull Pond or Higgins Pond and see them in summer as they were then, like precious jewels, and then he would visit the harbour and buy lobsters and the famous oysters from Wellfleet.

  The barn which became his studio was at the end of a short cobbled path and on the first dark October morning he went to the fuel shed and gathered logs and coal and lit a fire in the grate. He liked the flaky whitewashed walls and how his fishing rods looked against them. His crates had arrived and he had opened them up and spread his life on a canvas sheet across the floor.

  He adjusted the diamond burrs again and he set up his table and chair. Then he put on the old grey sweater and noted the red splash of paint on the neck. That was the day he helped Matilda to paint her kitchen door. But he let the thought go quickly and then he sat at his work desk and held a piece of glass in his hands and began to shape it. He knew that outside those wide double doors there were other people like him, that there were wet yellow meadows, and he worked on without knowing what would become of him.

  Later he hunkered down and ran his hands over the pieces, each one already smooth from the sea, each one already touched by some drinking sailor’s hands. Pale blue, turquoise, opaque, white, but for him he saw the different shades of darkness. He saw illness and he saw his own plight. Blue blood vessels. A girl’s face on a gurney as she struggled for air.

  He wanted to move on but first he had to give something back.

  He wanted to hand something out into the cosmos and for all the people who had died – and as he slowly cut each piece, it became something else and it wanted to attach itself to another, and yet neither piece had any idea of who or what they were.

  He wanted to be strong again and yet th
at night and for many nights after, when the wind picked up and the hurricane lamp flickered, he hunkered down on the Shaker stool and did not know where in hell he was.

  And there were nights when he felt really sick – and alone.

  So when a song from Westside Story came out on the radio, ‘There’s a place for us’, Glassman gave in to it and he put his face into his hands and he cried, and when he cried he coughed and then he cursed the air because it was already full of glass dust. And then he had to open the door and as the wind, already threatening snow, came in, he was not only miserable and sick, he was also very cold and he could see himself as he was – with warm snot on his face from crying – and his last remaining option then was to take a beer from the fridge and laugh.

  The low moment was now complete.

  It had passed.

  The idea of not having a TV had seemed worthy. He practically ate the words from his newspapers now. He had not wanted to be polluted by the media, he did not want the extra noise – and yet on a night like this, with only the wind for company, he would have been grateful to have been corrupted and polluted and infected by thirty minutes of Frasier or Ally McBeal or Friends.

  16 Where Are You, When You’re Not With Me?

  At first Matilda thought he was dead. She was sure of it and reported him missing to the police. Then she went to her closet and took down her favourite picture of him. She stopped then for a moment and sat with it and Godot came and lay beside her before turning on to his back. She placed two fingers on Glassman’s forehead and prayed that she was wrong and then she wrote out his details with her special black fountain pen.

  ‘Arthur Glassman. 5ft 9 inches. Hair turning grey. Blue-blue eyes. Beautiful hands’. And here she stopped and could not go on. And so she simply wrote in her phone numbers, her apartment, her office and her cell and finished, ‘Please send him home.’

  And Godot turned over and looked up at her. He seemed surprised by it, taken aback. But she covered her picture in plastic and went first to The Armory at Lexington and 26th Street and then to Union Square and St Vincent’s Wall. And there were all the others. The faces lost perhaps for ever now and Glassman joining them, smiling and eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream from the tub.

  ‘He hated broccoli,’ she told the woman who was crying beside her, and the woman replied, ‘We had an argument on our last night.’

  It was only when she reported him missing that the police went to his home. They arrived with a carpenter and she watched – with a key in her pocket – as the door was lifted and left leaning against a wall. Now that he was missing she was not able to come here alone. And how they stood – the door gone and the sunlight coming in through his windows and all his things as he had left them. No one wanted to be the one to walk in so it was Matilda who stepped forward easily, into a world where she had always believed she belonged.

  First she saw the telephone taken off the hook and this created a small pinprick of anger somewhere towards the back of her head. And the two officers watched her and one of them seemed amused by it. The other, a young Italian man called Nardoni, seemed embarrassed and afraid. They checked the closets and there were no clothes missing. Just one or two items that he could have been wearing on any given day.

  ‘His green sneakers are missing,’ she told them and everyone present presumed he had died in those shoes. When they lifted the lid of the trash, she saw the cream and gold envelopes with some coffee grits thrown over them and she blinked and swallowed in her pain. And then in the upstairs studio she found the emptiness she had wished for. The small glass ice mountain was packed up and gone.

  ‘Thank you, officers,’ she said quietly and she smiled sweetly up at them as she walked across the bedroom floor. Her legs were extended by stilettos and fishnet stockings and then she turned and said, ‘I’m sorry for wasting your time.’

  The next day she called a friend in Queens and asked him if he knew where she could buy a gun. And he, who had lost a college friend in the World Trade Center, said he understood why she was frightened and asked, ‘Where were you when it happened?’ and this was how everyone began their conversations now.

  Early on the morning of 9/11 Matilda had felt a new wind on Broadway. It lasted a few seconds and there was no hint of summer in it. The heat had stayed on into September but on this day, it carried a chill and she thought suddenly of wet red leaves from New England and freshly fallen Nova Scotia snow. Another New York fall. And soon the leaves would turn and turn, and fall and fall, a monsoon, a flood, a blizzard of red and yellow and gold, and all – without him to hold. ‘What was different?’ she would ask herself later, ‘different to the September mornings that followed,’ and she would answer, ‘I wasn’t afraid.’

  She fed her cat and he turned away as she cleaned his litter tray. Then she took her dry-cleaning over her arm and a subway map and she guessed that Godot went back to sleep.

  ‘When I go out,’ she told her friends in a hushed voice, ‘I am sure Godot turns on the TV, and sleeps on my bed, and does not put the CDs back into the correct cases, and I know he borrows my clothes and shoes, which he wears when he visits his private cat club on 72nd Street – and I’m sure he has other cats round,’ and here her friends would laugh and inside think, ‘She’s been on her own for too long.’

  But each evening when Matilda came home, he was always there to welcome her, curled, and rolling over to greet her, from a single patch of sunlight on her floor.

  On that day Mrs Schwartz said, ‘Good morning, Matilda’ and she was wearing her white Persian cat like a stole. She was also polishing the number on her apartment door and she was wearing her cultured pearls. She did not tell Matilda that she had an appointment with her optician that morning and because she was going downtown for it, she would also meet her daughter for lunch. She did not know then that her train would get in earlier and that she would wait at a diner on Wall Street, looking up at the office where her youngest daughter worked. She did not tell Matilda any of it. It was all so important but how could she have known? Now that she was gone Matilda could not stop thinking about her. At night when she closed her eyes she could still see those pearls and her smile. Before 9/11 fear had not moved into her. It did not belong inside her. It did not take over her space, sit on her couch, eat her food and refuse to get out.

  In the same way Matilda did not tell anyone that she took the elevator instead of the stairs. That the fire extinguisher had fallen on its side and that she put it right. That she bought her newspaper from a vendor and her coffee at Starbucks on Broadway, instead of on Amsterdam. How all of these small details combined to weave and map out her day. Did the flower-sellers notice that she wore a new navy dress on September 11th and that she had not washed her hair?

  The girl in Starbucks gave her a mocha in a hot orange cup and when she smiled she said, ‘Have a nice day, ma’am.’

  She did not know that it was a day to stay at home – under the bedclothes, or in a closet under coats or in an apartment under the floorboards.

  And when her friend in Queens told her that he was washing his car when the news came through on the radio, it sounded strangely American and therefore more noble and patriotic than the story she had to tell. As he spoke, his voice breaking with emotion, she lost any real will to explain – that as the first tower fell she was pushing a $20 bill into a tipping envelope in a hair salon in the Village after having her black hair dyed peroxide blonde.

  One week later when she rode the subway to Brooklyn Matilda wanted to talk out loud. She wanted to be one of those blonde crazies who carried a shopping bag filled with old newspapers and made other people look around. On 20 September she ran down the steps as the heavens opened and heard the other feet rattling in behind. It was so New York – for everyone to have the same sort of problems, like losing a love or getting caught in the rain, and no one would ever say a word to the same suffering citizen at their side. The train began to move and Matilda felt that she was going backwards and moving
away into a deeper, darker place. She was going to Brooklyn and she was suddenly frightened and confused by it.

  ‘What have you done with Manhattan?’ she wanted to ask.

  When Matilda thought about Manhattan, she thought about bright yellow taxis that could float through the air. And the green leaves of early summer, and people who always remembered to carry umbrellas and still dashed like rabbits into the subways at the first sign of rain. She thought about doughnuts from a vendor in Washington Square, yoga mats and a little hat shop in SoHo where the hats in the window looked like iced cupcakes. When Matilda thought about Brooklyn, the only colour she could think of was ‘brown’.

  She knew the A train and C, the D and the F… but take her out of Manhattan and Matilda felt like a child who did not know where she was going. She opened a copy of Time Out and looked again for the bar called Madisons. It was close to midnight and she did not know where she was going and as fewer passengers got on and more and more got off, she found herself in an empty dripping station deep in a foreign borough and she wondered quite seriously if she would lose her life.

  She wore a pair of high heels and a white belted mac, and her scarf, a red and pink Hermes, was pulled up loosely to cover her hair. Yes, it was different to be blonde. It was simple; men always looked at her now. When she stepped into a room it was as if a light bulb had gone on. They saw her and she liked it – except that in Brooklyn she did not want to be seen. She followed the map along Atlantic Avenue and of course no yellow cab in its right mind would cross the Brooklyn Bridge. She stopped and asked directions from a young couple who were walking and sharing a pizza slice. It smelt warm and good but now when she saw a couple in love she always felt a pang of jealous pain.