A late light snow had covered the East Village early that morning and now was melting in brilliant sun. The apartment had a southern exposure. We walked with the agent into a blast of sunlight, the hardwood floors gleaming, the white walls the cleanest slates of our lives.
I’ll take it, I should have said. Instead I said to the agent impulsively, “We’ll take it, my husband and I will take it.” I did not trip over the word husband or the word we. Tilla did not look at me in surprise. He looked at me expectantly. Then he smiled.
“I don’t know,” Tilla said, still smiling, pacing out the number of square feet. “I’m not sure it will be big enough for us.” He looked at the agent. “I will have to build walls, you see, because I need privacy for my office. Is there a limit on the number of telephone lines the building will allow?”
Telephone lines?
The agent assured him he could have as many lines as he wished.
“Well, darling, we will not have much room left for our living room, but who needs a living room? I will take this for my office space.” The apartment had an L-shaped dining-living room. The space he gestured to was the large part of the L, the living room with the big window. “Then we will build the wall here.” He pointed to a place where the wall would effectively block out the sun from the rest of the space. “That will leave us a good cooking and eating area, and of course, a very nice bedroom!”
But the bedroom would have to be divided, too. I was determined to have a place to write.
“All right, all right, darling, we can build a wall right here, with a study for you like this.” This wall, too, would preserve the light for our bedroom but leave my study in darkness.
The rental agent was handing Tilla the papers. “Oh no, don’t hand them to me, sir!” He leapt away like a burly antelope. “My wife”—he smiled at me both shyly and wickedly—“my wife takes care of all our business.”
I took the papers and told the agent when I could have the rest of the money in a certified check and also told him that the lease would be in both of our names. Less than an hour had passed since I sold myself into bondage, me, the complete woman.
—
“You knew what he was like when you moved in together. You’ve known him for years!” Maggie was right, of course.
I had packed. Tilla had packed. I had paid the movers. I had put Tilla’s name on my checking account, and we paid for the walls, and for the phones, but we could not pay the next month’s rent. Running out of money, I took a loan. This I did not tell Polly when I gave her the new phone number. We were trying it, I said. After ten years, why not try it?
I was going to save him the way I could not save…But Tilla really wasn’t my dad (it was only I who cast him so, though he took the role). I was saving him from the circumstances of an artist’s life; he wasn’t struggling with an addiction like alcoholism.
“I know I’ve known him for years,” I said to Maggie, my head back on the couch in her apartment, listening to the program she was preparing, “but it’s not the same.”
“Oh, Mol, he’s not changed very much,” she said, brushing her forehead with her sleeve, leaving a swath of mascara above her blue eye. She was exasperated and mildly reproachful. We were both sweating. The late afternoon sun was pouring through her windows, and she had been practicing for hours. It was after school. Way after school. Time to go home. But I couldn’t go home. Home was where the walls were built giving me no sun. Home was where Tilla had forbidden me from entering the kitchen because he needed his own special food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and I couldn’t cook it and so he would. He had taken over. It was only fair, he explained. If I went out and made the money, then he should cook.
Increasingly I made my living from private poetry students. My adult students didn’t want to come to the little dark corner I had to give them, and they became hard to schedule. There was Tilla, greeting them unshaven in his bathrobe, a spoon in his hand. I was living with a housewife with a beard who, like other depressed housewives, couldn’t seem to cope with the housework.
“How about the laundry?” I growled at him when I finally got home.
“The laundry? Yes. Someday I will do the laundry. But not today. Today did not feel like laundry day to me.”
“But the sheets are overflowing the hamper!”
“You and your hamper! You are hampering me! I am trying to rebuild my troupe! I have nowhere to dance! I have nowhere to work!” His face was reddening.
“All I do is work! I teach at Friends, I teach private students, and now I teach a graduate course!”
“Work is good for you, darling. You have an excellent reputation as a poet, so you are asked to do these courses.”
“Tilla, all I do is work to pay your rent!”
Let me do this for you, and do that as well, let me do and do and do—and when I am so tired won’t you care for me?
“It is your rent, darling, it is the exact same rent you always pay, so do not tell me that I am costing you a cent. I cost you nothing. Look at your friend Lily. She has the live-in Tom who makes the beds for her and puts the roof over her head for which she pays!”
“But Tom actually makes the beds, Tilla. You won’t even wash the clothes.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Bed-making, laundry, these are minor things! The big fact is that I save you money because by yourself you are always eating out, and I cook for you. What do you want for dinner, by the way? Well, don’t spend time thinking about it. I have already ordered the groceries.”
I had not sublet the studio I owned, but had kept it, empty but for a couple of chairs, to meet my adult students in, and eventually to share with someone else who needed extra space. Now I was paying both rents. I might as well have written out a check to Tilla when he was still in Brooklyn and paid for the loft. It would have been a better deal for both of us, but instead, I became a husband.
—
“It was an accident!” he repeated before he grew silent.
“It was no accident, you asshole! You haven’t got the nerve to tell me that there was no motivation for you to break that vase! I don’t care if the table slipped—if your object had been on that table you would have caught it!”
I had crashed, of course, as well as the vase. I had broken. When I went to the bathroom and looked at my face, it was apoplectically red. I never in my life had seen this look in my eyes, contorted, squalling, accusing, infantile. I’d called him an asshole. All my life I’d tried not to say the awful things my parents said to one another, and now I was doing it.
Throughout our argument—“You’re potbellied!” I spat at him.
“Your spine is crooked and you look like an old woman. Where is your babushka? I can’t believe you’re going uptown to Maggie’s looking like you do!” he spat back—my poor, dislocated parrot shrieked. Tilla and my pet did not get along. Cookie had started to bite. She attacked him whenever he opened the door to her cage.
It was like our house on Pilgrim Road. Polly was at the store. Gail was out at cheerleading practice. And I was home. Home and helpless against my poor father, the boy who was astonished to see he had grown into a monster. Surely you are under a spell and my real father is buried beneath you, waiting to be released so he can love me.
Oh, Mother, what cry can I utter to call you home to make the monster stop? Ruta was at the store, I mean, in her office, far uptown. Everything was on an even keel, wasn’t it? I was, finally, who I was, wasn’t I? Three steps forward, two steps back. I got dressed and put the cover on the parrot’s cage to calm it down. It had not stopped shrieking, even though I had.
—
“I’m going to have to leave him,” I said softly, as if I had been asked to pray aloud. Above us hung Maggie’s candelabra with twenty candle stubs, all lit. It swayed in a mild breeze from the ceiling fan, and lit the room in uneven swaths. The mantel, full of white carnations, was reflected in a mirror above the sideboard with its white pitcher.
“Well, yes”—s
he nodded, her own head bobbing, flower-like—“you might have to…you probably will have to.”
“I’ll have to face living alone,” I said dully.
Maggie looked at me aghast. “Living alone isn’t a plague, you know. We’ve both enjoyed living alone.”
“I know that, but…”
“I was satisfied, I was contented to be alone,” she continued. “Stayed up till three in the morning reading what I wanted when I wanted, wonderful friends, darling, sweet men to date and be with, but I didn’t want to marry them.”
“But now you’re very comfy, Maggie!” I protested.
“Now I play my cello and I keep George at bay,” she joked.
Her black cats, Fleur and Soames, crawled into our laps.
“He asked me to marry him again.” She chuckled.
“Will you?”
“God, no, no, no! It ruins everything! I’m determined to do this my own wrongheaded way.” She’d never finished her B.A., never finished at Juilliard, wouldn’t get an academic job, wouldn’t marry.
“Why does he want to get married? Has he suddenly changed his mind about a family? Does he want to adopt children now?”
“No, no.” She scowled. “He’s the one who volunteered to get the vasectomy, remember? He’s in the middle of his life, buzzing around the world making deals and having me. And I have my cello and him.”
—
The apartment was dark, except for the light over Tilla’s desk, when I returned. Tilla loomed in the doorway of the bedroom, sobbing. “It was not my fault, Molly! I swear to you it was not my fault at all! It was an accident!”
“I don’t think the way we fight is such an accident,” I said saucily.
“No! NO! It is not our fighting, it is the little bird!”
The parrot’s cage was empty. The cover was draped over a chair. The window was open.
“I only wanted to make friends with it! I thought that since you were gone, I would try, I would really try to make friends with the bird that is also you, even though you are peacock and not parrot.”
A train with an unexpected switch of track ahead, I had to move my huge mechanical body, angling dangerously to the detour track. My landscape flew by me.
“I took off the cover,” Tilla said, “and I opened the cage door, and the thing flew out so fast I did not know what happened. And the window, it was opened only this far! Honestly, just this little bit!” He had turned his own body into the body of the parrot, narrowing toward the window. He was acting and dancing the reconstructed scene.
It was the kind of window that opened horizontally. Even if it were open at its full angle, it would have been hard for the parrot to fly through, and the opening was now at about two inches. Had he narrowed the opening after the bird flew out?
In what direction did she fly? It had happened hours before. In the dark—birds don’t see in the dark. I fled downstairs and Tilla followed me. I paced the streets and called, not energetically, but through a strange mobilized kind of exhaustion. I moved lugubriously, as if I weighed 400 pounds in 90 percent humidity. Buildings, more buildings, and, in the park, trees full of predators. She would be eaten. Or, she would get hungry and fly to someone’s shoulder and be adopted. Or fly to someone’s windowsill. Or stay in the trees and starve. Or she had flown into something and crashed and died, or was hurt, and then would die.
Tilla paced the streets after me, saying again what he had done, in exact detail. It was an accident, he insisted.
I should have fought him harder to get the ugly, expensive, sun-blocking window screens he adamantly refused to cooperate in buying or installing. I should have clipped the bird’s wings rather than carefully closing all the windows when I allowed her to fly around on her own. Every bird owner knows you should keep them clipped and never let them fly. But I couldn’t. I loved that animal who flew to my shoulder. I lived with feathers and bird shit to be with her, she who landed on bowls of berries and flung them at walls, who ate the heads off sixteen tulips I’d carefully grown, who posted a vigil in the night when I was sick, who severed the telephone cord, who cocked her head to get her neck scratched. She clucked. She kissed. She grabbed food from my mouth. We were great pets to one another. And she had flown away.
She was as gone as the beautiful vase my student had given me was broken. Tilla had let her out. Tilla had broken the vase. Now two shimmering things were destroyed and, and still, strangely, I did not completely blame him in the way that I still blamed Ted. I had felt until then that I had to save Tilla, the way I could not save Ted. For the first time in a decade it occurred to me that Ted and Tilla began with the same sound.
Then the hopelessness of finding the bird became hopelessness itself.
As I had moved in slow painful gigantean maneuvers to save her, even as I knew I could not, guilt and panic seemed to calcify into my joints, and I walked in a state of crusted exhaustion.
The subway to the Upper West Side seemed to take all next afternoon. “I’ve suddenly gotten ten years older,” I said to Ruta, for I had finally made an appointment with her. I could hardly consider myself graduated from therapy now. “I’m aging. I’m stiff,” I whispered. “That’s why I’m back.” Having fought against depression all my life with the weapon of sheer activity, I could only conclude that I had gotten old when I lay that weapon, the only one in my arsenal, down on the ground of despair.
“It’s the end,” Maggie said, as she helped me try to get an enormous plastic bag over the brass bird cage a few weeks later. Now all I had left of Cookie was the poem I’d written about first seeing her: a chartreuse candy kiss/nibbling on my sundress.
“How can you go on with someone who’s killed your pet?”
“Well, he didn’t exactly kill it,” I said defensively. “It was an accident.”
Maggie was speechless. She opened her eyes wide and looked as if what I’d said was a wilted salad someone expected her, a woman who ate her greens impeccably fresh, to consume. I handed her the packing tape. We were taking the cage up to my old apartment. Of course I could have taken the cage uptown myself. That is, when I was myself. A heavy numbness had fallen over me. I heard my voice on the answering machine lumbering slow and far away. My clothes were dirty. I put on any old thing.
From our quiet barge, motoring the Welsh canals at a pace slower than walking, through locks so easy a child could spin the wheels to open them, Maggie and George and Tilla and I were mesmerized by what we first mistook for white blooms on the distant hills. Then the flowers moved, and we realized the hills were polka-dotted with grazing sheep. Back home Maggie herself borrowed sheep from a farmer to crop the meadow at her parents’ house. The meadow edged a fanciful garden she and her sisters had dug. So the sheep echoed her grandmother’s Welsh childhood, which the four of us had come to investigate. We had fallen into the pages of an antique diary, complete with misty autumn days and, oddly for Wales, sunny days—two American women artists and their flamboyant European husband-equivalents.
George was paying our way, inspired by Maggie’s wish to take care of us in our obvious need, and I was very moved.
“We are beyond our station,” Tilla whispered to me after one of our little meals in the galley of the barge. We were folding up the blue-and-white-striped tablecloth Maggie had brought in her suitcase in case there were no domestic amenities on board. She was right. After we cleared the table, we hooked it back on the wall, and the galley retransformed into our bedroom. “When you are beyond your station,” he insisted, “it is only imbalance and unhappiness.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
It was time to play one of the many fantasy parlor games the four of us loved to exhaustion. Maggie invented the topic: Who Would You Want to Be If You Were Born the Opposite Sex? and then decided that the man she would want to be was George. “You’re the most valorous human being I’ve ever met,” she declared while the leonine George beamed. Would I choose Tilla? Sullen and jealous of her, I passed my turn. The men,
after naming news reporters and dead queens, decided they would spice up the game by assuming the identities of famous prostitutes, then Maggie and I got busy assuring them that they wouldn’t like their lives at all. “You are right, Molly and Maggie, darlings,” Tilla said at last. “I often have thought that is no way to live a life.”
By our third day together Tilla had become, irrepressibly, the choreographer of our boat, our dance master, the leader of our troupe. And thus he pitted himself against George Sinopolous, the Greek businessman, complaining at George’s decisions, ordering him about, whispering to me how badly everything was done. He could not share the driving of the boat with Maggie’s rich boyfriend. He simply didn’t know how.
On we floated, down the waterways, sleeping in our too-small bunks, too near one another to make love. On we ate, little candies we found at every stop, George with his easy angular body, Maggie nearly as tall, her eyes peering from her face held on the straight stem of her cellist’s spine, and me shorter, Tilla burlier, all of us tanned at the end of the summer.
One day at the helm, with Tilla standing by helping to dock, George calculated their ages, announcing that the difference would make Tilla the age of his son, if George had had a child at sixteen. We were tying up at a tiny, busy canal village whose entire population seemed to be gathering for the Grandfather-Grandchild Fishing Contest. At this Tilla flew into a rage.
“George the father,” he spat, “you are mere, you are merely a wealthy Athenian! You think you can conquer New York on your family money? I, Tilla, was selling my camera over a barbed-wire fence in Eastern Europe so I could conquer New York!” As if on stage Tilla shouted at the top of his lungs from the deck of the barge. The grandfathers in their jackets and the grandchildren in their sweaters gazed in wonder and horror at the man who was either wrecking or starring in their annual fete. Tilla leapt off the barge and sprinted down the towpath through the hundred sun-splotched faces, leaving me to face my oldest friend, which I did, stammering apologies, tempted to turn against Tilla and stay with her—he would be back, he would have to—but the tension was too much for me, and I ran after him.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 24