“I am too old for good dancing right now, Mrs. Moore, forty-two years old, but not too old to direct our performances.”
“But who will carry on your work?” she persisted.
“Ah, I will have the pleasure of choosing among all the children of my sisters and my brother and my cousins. Right now there are fifteen of them! And probably more to come.”
I drove my passengers back to the art colony, dropping them off at their cottages, and returned to the farmhouse, where I met Mrs. Moore dumping her last passenger. We chatted on the gravel road. “Well, that marriage is going down the toilet,” she said to me as I absently kicked mulch back over the roots of the hollyhocks by the gardening shed, a miniature shuttered yellow clapboard cottage.
“You think so?”
“My God, she wants children, he doesn’t. She wants a regular house, he doesn’t. She wants a middle-class life. He doesn’t. All he wants is ephemeral fame and fortune and, my God, she’s an American, how long will she be able to take that family? He’s yours for the asking, darling.”
“All I want to do is write my poems.”
“Keep lying, Molly. Why don’t you just enjoy yourself?” she said as she opened her car door. “He’s nice for a fling. He’s sexy, no? Especially since he doesn’t have sex with his wife.”
“Whoa! What do you mean he doesn’t have sex with his wife?”
“That’s what he told me, entre nous, they haven’t had sex in three years.”
“I can’t believe it! He’s oozing sex.” I actually shocked myself by saying this. I hadn’t admitted it to myself before.
“Well, darling, that’s what he confided in me, so enjoy yourself!” she said as she closed the car door. “But watch out,” she called as she drove past the trellised steps, “he’s a handful!”
—
When the Szabo cousins and Tilla and Nina performed, all the jealous guests crowded into the barn to judge them, but the dances, so rambunctious, yet traditional, were sharply formed, and stunning. We clapped till our hands hurt. We wrung our wrists to relieve them of clapping so long. Mariah clambered to her feet yelling, “Bravo!”
“My God, Tilla,” I said, breathlessly hugging him in his sweat-drenched costume, “that’s the sexiest thing I ever saw!”
During the weekend of Nina’s visit, I watched Tilla forbid her to gamble—there was a card game—forbid her to smoke, forbid her to drink, and tell a story of how he, in a fit of temper, threw a lemon chiffon pie at the wall, just missing her. I saw the stony fury in Nina’s high-cheekboned face and I knew that Mariah Moore, as novelists often so presciently are about the behavior of others, was completely right about their marriage. I thought, My God, I’d never let him forbid those things to me. I’d never let him throw a pie at ME.
All Nina wanted, she told Mariah, was a nice house with a swing set in the back yard, and two sets of dishes, one for everyday and a gold leaf one for company.
“You’ll wait a lifetime for that gold leaf,” Mariah sneered.
After Nina left, the weekend shrank to an island our river of mutual admiration flowed past. Like double reflecting currents we cast light after angle of light on Tilla’s dances and my poems. I could articulate what he put bodily into his art. My descriptions of what he did delighted him—he taped them and transcribed them into his foundation applications; and his encouragement of my poetry thrilled me—yes, of course I should move to New York and read my delicate metaphors that were like dances themselves in front of an audience.
By now we were having picnic lunches in a meadow near his studio. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all evening, every evening.
—
How would I justify to myself sleeping with this married man?
“It’s over, Molly,” Mariah Moore said as she removed a piece of tobacco from her tongue. “His marriage is kaput. Have no qualms.”
“But you have no qualms about anything, Mariah!” I said.
“Darling, you don’t know what qualms are.”
I hated her condescension to me, but was fascinated by the blasé wisdom she exhaled. “You are far too inexperienced to understand qualms, my dear. Qualms require mistakes in life, and you are too young to have made serious mistakes. Though perhaps just now you are about to.”
“I thought you told me to grab him! First you tell me his marriage is kaput and I should go after him, and now you tell me I’m going to make the mistake of my life!”
“I’m telling you adulthood is ambiguity, Molly.” She cast her infamous cold eye on me. I wriggled to escape that unblinkered gaze.
“I want my life to be about good decisions.”
“I never made a good decision until I reached menopause. Hormones made all my decisions all my life.”
“Hormones! I can’t listen to this, Mariah. You’re giving me a sore throat.”
She took no offense, but fished in her giant canvas bag for a throat lozenge. “Here, darling, try to take care of yourself,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to my novel. I’ve left two characters at it in bed for three days now. The poor things are exhausted and I’ve at least got to get them to the bathroom.”
I held out until my last evening at the art colony. Tilla and I stood in my stone house, the books, the papers, the clothes piled haphazardly in their boxes and suitcases.
“You must pack this,” Tilla whispered, giving me a sheaf of drawings. “These are the notations for the steps, and drawings of the sets for my new work, Peacock Walk.” It was a performance piece for me. The sketches of the costumes displayed outrageous peacock-feathered contraptions.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” I repeated stupidly. “Oh, Tilla…these are beautiful! I am so…” I said lamely, “…honored!”
“You are a good friend to me, Molly, you help me say what I need to say about my dances, you understand how I need to be away from my family, just as you need to be away from yours, to grow.” Slowly, in fragments, the story of my family had emerged in our conversations, sandwiched in tightly among Tilla’s stories, mostly in response to questions by Mariah. “This is how I thank you.”
Of course, I had a thank-you for him as well. I had written a poem about the dancing and about his imitation of a baby as we ate ice cream in the parking lot the night he announced Nina was coming. After I read him the poem, he reached for me in the way that we had not reached for one another, although we had occasionally taken one another’s hand, or sat shoulder to shoulder.
“Let’s take off our clothes,” he said then.
After we did, we lay on the naked little pallet that served as a bed in my stone house, and Tilla Szabo told me I was beautiful. “But how can I be beautiful to you? I’m not a dancer—I sit with my chubby little belly on my lap as I type my poems for hours….”
“But you are beautiful because you are not a dancer. You are my soft, lovely poet. I can look at muscles all day long, Molly. What I want to look at it is you.”
I didn’t believe him, but I accepted it, like a plant so deprived of water that the soil actually repels the moisture at first, the watering having to soften the mineraled crust before the moisture can seep, creeping down to the roots where my need for this admiration was so profound. Once I had seen him probe the pistil of a wildflower, and now he pored over me with his eyes and hands, as if I were his specimen, the object of all his gaze, as he was of mine. His clean barrel chest, almost without hair, its pink nipples planted in pectoral muscles which were almost rectangular, his beginning of a belly, his hooded penis against his thigh, he lay like an Odalisque, calm and luxurious, lifting an expressive arm toward me as I reached toward him, hungry, yet removed, looking to see what was before me. He touched my breasts firmly, as if he were a culinary maestro, testing fruit in awe at the market. “Beautiful,” he whispered. He didn’t seem to be lying. He had a kind of surrender in his eyes. “Lie back for me,” he suggested, and held my chin in his hand as he kissed me. “Loosen your tongue,” he instructed. “There….” There we were, kissing so long
our tongues didn’t know whose mouth they belonged in. We crushed together, and then we finally parted.
I took his penis in my hand. “Oh God, don’t touch me so! I feel I will come too soon,” he said, and put his finger unerringly on my clitoris sparing me the necessity to teach him about my body. After all, as he had told me, he knew my body better than I did.
—
When I returned to the arts council, I applied for every grant in The Guide to Foundations, taught the children, ran up long distance phone bills so expensive I had to put them on my credit cards, and received Tilla on the interspersed days his family was performing within striking distance. I was having an affair with a married man.
“Try not to bore me with your flimsy ethics, Molly,” Mariah said on the phone from her Broome Street loft. “This is a major move in your life. And, I might add, a major move in Nina Szabo’s life, whoever she is and whatever she decides to do.”
“But it’s wrong, I’m doing something wrong, Mariah.”
“See a therapist.”
“I don’t have a therapist right now.” Ruta had moved her practice to New York, and I had struck out on my own.
“Get one.”
“I will soon, I’m moving to New York in a few months.”
“You are! Jesus Christ, how did this happen? You never tell the best news first!”
“I got the Chevrolet Grant, I’ve got the money to move—now I just have to get a job.”
“I’ve got some leads, darling, maybe I can help you get a job. But I can’t help you with your morals, Molly. I’m completely neutral there. I don’t want to be your mother any more than I can help it, and I sure as hell won’t be your therapist. The minute you get to New York, you must get some help. New York is going to crush you if you don’t watch out, that is, if you don’t get someone to watch out for you. And believe me, our darling boy Tilla Szabo is not going to watch out for you in that way. The only place he’s going to take care of you is in bed. Not insignificant, Miss Poet, but not sufficient, either.”
It always surprised me that Mariah took an interest in me. And Tilla’s interest surprised me. I was clumsy. I couldn’t dance or tell witty stories full of famous people’s names. I was neither a social nor a physical acrobat. I wasn’t even sure I could write. Sometimes my poems looked like bright parakeets to me, flying and communicative. Other times they looked like guano.
“You are a smart woman in the world. You are a sexy woman in bed. That’s a good kind of dancing. And that’s all I care about,” Tilla said summarily on the phone.
“Don’t you think I should learn to speak Hungarian?” I said, daunted by the prospect.
“There’s enough Hungarian in my life,” he said, to my relief. “If you meet my family sometime, I will teach you to say thank you in Hungarian to my mother and you will keep your eyes lowered when my father talks to you and that will be enough. What I need to learn I can learn from you in English.”
So I sold the cinnamon Toyota I’d bought with Polly’s down payment for my new life alone, resigned from the arts council, and tramped the streets of Manhattan looking at one dingy sublet after another until the little white studio with the parquet floors and the disreputable elevator that looked like an empty unclean fishbowl appeared, and I agreed to a rent three times what my new clerical job with an arts agency would pay for. My astronomical new rent left nothing for food, clothes, transportation, or my overdue phone bills, let alone the moving expenses I incurred and the psychotherapy I was contemplating. All this happened while Tilla was on tour in South America with part of the troupe. Nina had stayed home to help the accountant straighten out the everlasting mess of the Szabo Dancers’ books.
I’d given away half my possessions, to Polly’s surprise. After all, I was the sentimental one who wanted to keep everything from La Grange. My move took a lot of explaining to Polly, who thought I had a good deal where I was, and it never occurred to me to lie. I even told her about Nina. Skeptical and disgusted, my mother had her own problems. She had been diagnosed with diabetes and the chocolate-covered cherries that accompanied the novels and cigarettes she cherished were out of her life. She hated her food. The roof at La Grange needed fixing. She would wait till I visited to do that. Visited? How on earth was I going to afford that? I would have to think of something. I stood exhilarated in my new apartment in New York with my grant spent and every credit card at its limit, my heart a helium balloon. My new phone rang. It was Ruta, who was willing to take me on again. The phone rang again: Maggie, back from her tour with her new string quartet. A third time: Tilla from Bogota. Nina had left the Brooklyn apartment and no one knew where she was. The last call came from the arts agency I was to be a typist for. I was fired. The agency was suffering cutbacks.
I was the luckiest woman on earth. I had New York and my old friend for company. I was rid of a job I would have hated. And Tilla was coming back for his forty-third birthday, two weeks away. My thirty-fourth birthday was six weeks away. My bills flew overhead like a flock of exciting migrating shoreline birds, flashing the silver of their wings against the sky. All was possible. Everything was poetry.
A sonnet is the size of a plump made bed, and a blank page is a room. A sonnet is a garden bed, bordered by a paper lawn. It is where consciousness sleeps, and the sleeping beauty of the unconscious wakes. Wake up and make that bed! I said to myself. And while you’re at it, make yourself up. Make up a self. I’d begun a group of sonnets about love and desire. Dreams, brains, furl and guts, I wrote, what we are, then teased the idea some more:
That’s my bargain, the Pax
Peacock, with the world. Look hard, life’s soft. Life’s cache
is flesh, flesh, and flesh.
The world was my body. Not only my body with Tilla—Tilla and an amaryllis bulb, Tilla and grapes, wet in a bowl—but my body on its own. I gloried in sex, the secret of life that all adults knew. If I’d dared to move to New York, could I dare use this life-force to fill the lungs of a type of poem most people thought was dead? I sensed the words breathing under the concrete. She lays each beautifully mooned index finger/in the furrow on the right and on the left/sides of her clitoris and lets them linger/in their swollen cribs….
But I wrote my poems only on Saturday mornings. Each of the weekday mornings I crammed onto the Second Avenue bus that crawled through the rush hour downtown to Friends Seminary, a Quaker day school. Now I was a full-time English teacher and worried about gum on the chairs and whether sixty twelve-year-olds could spell. When I lucked into my job as a last-minute replacement, I was told that teachers always teach the grade of their own turning point. I taught seventh grade, the same year I became a mother to Gail and a caretaker to Ted.
At 8:29 A.M. in the old Meeting House on Fifteenth Street I climbed in beside my adolescent charges who wiggled back and forth on the nineteenth-century benches, paint-thickened by the annual coats of gray that shielded the wood from their scuffs.
At 8:30 A.M. the Meeting House fell silent by unanimous agreement. Several hundred children, ages ten through thirteen, settled into a stillness deep enough to hear the traffic outside and to feel the light, or the damp, or the heat, and whatever feelings had been racing through us since we woke. For ten minutes the shifts and creaks of the benches, the whispers, the illicit page turning shaped the noiselessness into a children’s peace, achieved through children’s wills. With it, a dignity that lay disguised in each of us assumed an outline. Then the ten minutes were up and we all shook hands and the voluble morning announcements began. By the time we left for our classes we were an ordinary mass of bodies flooding the stairwells, though a rind of the extraordinary remained—we had after all, for one whole sixth of an hour, entered a silence cool as a hand on each of our foreheads.
Up in Room 303 it was poetry-writing day, though first we were working on The Catcher in the Rye. A few of the fifteen kids lay on the floor, composing their Holden Caulfield New York Travelogues, others worked at tables, pasting up their Holde
n Caulfield Scrapbooks, digging for the best quotes to use as captions, while a couple of boys stretched out on the fifteen-foot stuffed corduroy worm that was usually slung across the bookcase. They were still reading the novel. Up front at the desks, a group of four discussed the book.
“You mean he’s telling the whole story from a mental hospital!” Wild-haired Hazel Zimmer was shocked.
Smooth little Fionula Frye exclaimed, “You mean he’s crazy?”
Niles Baldassarian unwound his long legs from his desk and said in a voice so slow an anxious person would be tempted to supply the words for him, “My…dad says…” All the kids except Hazel had known Niles since kindergarten, so a familiarity soft as flannel swathed the room as he continued, “…says people in nut houses are…” It wasn’t exactly that he paused between every word, it was that his voice seemed to unwind from a spool larger than most people’s, “…saner than we are.”
“I think he’s sane,” Hazel pronounced from behind her special blue glasses. She was trying them as a filter for more efficient reading. Frizzy haired and lanky, Hazel was the newest member of this group, a refugee from a less understanding uptown school. They’d taught her to take copious notes, and she looked up from them expectantly. Her block print—she’d failed to master script—pushed all the way to the left and right sides of the page without a concept of margins.
“I think he’s weird,” Philip Wu muttered, doing his vocabulary homework under his book. He wore a huge man’s wristwatch.
“I don’t. I love Holden,” Fionula said. She had a perfect oval face, as if she had been drawn in a beginning art class, and straight, shining brown hair. She wore a turtleneck with Scotty dogs on it, and she was smart as a whip.
“So, Molly,” Niles said, “do you think…Salinger is a genius?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said to Niles. “What do you think? Is Salinger a genius?”
“Sure.”
“Are all geniuses crazy?” Fionula asked seriously.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 17