The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  It was early evening. Maud had helped her mother prepare supper in the kitchen. While it cooked, her mother standing guardian over the erratic gas burners, Maud leaned against the arch to the living room watching her father. Even now, in his reduced state he was a fine, soldierly looking man. She moved over to his chair and stood behind him, watching him settle his men into their evening encampment at Valley Forge, his slim head, so like Spencer’s, bent toward them as though to overhear their army talk. Maud wondered about his contribution to her heredity: there seemed to be an incredible chasm, a genetic misunderstanding, or perhaps a satiric contradiction between his flat, military figure and her massive, shapeless form, with breasts that reached almost to her waist and, when restrained with specially made contraptions, buttressed against her front in a ridiculous way. Bent now over his land forces, his vision was still good at sixty, while Maud’s young eyes, small and myopic, were further reduced in size by her thick glasses. Wearing her glasses and looking in the mirror, she told Luther, her eyes looked like raisins. She was as short as her mother and father, but in early adolescence she had expanded far beyond Florence’s tight, trim, serviceable figure and Joseph’s military spareness. She could not figure out (literally, she said to Luther, making, for her, an unaccustomed, weak joke) how she had come from them. By an uncharitable Creator she had been deprived of a proper neck. Her backside took on a compensatory capaciousness to her breasts, as though some humorous god had decided to create a vertical human seesaw. In a course in anthropology that Ruth Benedict taught at Columbia, Maud learned the anatomical name for the shape of her buttocks: steatopygia. By nature, Hottentot women had the same shape. In their tribe it was no curse but a sign of female beauty. Great buttocks elongated and stretched out behind them to extraordinary lengths were regarded as highly desirable, a valuable dowry, by their suitors.

  Short, nearsighted and overflowing the normal bounds of sightly flesh, Maud hated the body to which she had been assigned. Even her mouth with its broad lips was bad. ‘Poor mouth,’ she often called herself. Florence believed it was the result of her insistence, until she was almost six, upon keeping both her thumb and her first finger in her mouth, so long that they became sodden and bore down heavily on her lower lip. When she finally removed the water-logged thumb and finger, shamed in the presence of her first-grade classmates, Maud’s lips were permanently broadened and swollen. ‘It must have been habit,’ she thought. ‘It was clearly not heredity.’

  Her room in the New Baltimore house had no mirror, a lack for which she felt gratitude as she grew up. Rarely did she look into the one in the bathroom. But in the laughing eyes and sly mouths of her high school classmates she saw some indication of what she had grown to look like. Her hair was straight and coarse; she had her mother cut it short. She combed it using only her fingers, achieving some degree of accuracy, needing no help from a mirror. Closeted and protected from her self, she forgot for long periods of time the outlandish shape that encased the poet in her.

  At the end of the summer, with one excruciating bolt, Joseph Noon’s heart gave out. In his useless state, needing them for everything, he had been like a slowly dying child. Seated in his chair late in the day, he dropped a soldier onto the map, gripped his chest with both weak hands, called ‘Florence’ and died. Maud was upstairs packing, Florence was cooking supper: it was an off-duty night. The rush of frantic events that always follows a death in the family obliterated for them both the sorrow they felt at the sudden absence from their lives of the gentle man they had cared for and loved.

  Florence was to live out her life in New Baltimore, always aware of his lingering presence in the house, her memory of him sharp, clear and painful. She came to forget his long-absent army career and believed that every day of their lives had been spent together. Maud returned to New York and relegated her beloved father to the useful fabric out of which she would make poetry.

  Just before Christmas vacation, 1939, the weekend before the recess, Maud, defying all the house rules, invited Luther up to her room to see their tree. He came up when the housemother wasn’t looking, sneaking up the stairs. The tree turned out to be one full branch of Northern pine stuck upright into a bed of modeling clay in a large flowerpot. It was lavishly decorated with tinsel, strung popcorn and cranberries. Luther had rushed over after class at three, pleased to be asked up. He expressed admiration for the tree. He took a snapshot of it, a shadowy Maud behind it, for she refused to allow him to come closer or to turn on extra lights. That afternoon the light outside was gray, the window frosted over after a morning ice storm. Luther was hardly able to see through the lens.

  After the picture taking, Maud made coffee on Minna’s illegal hot plate. They drank it in silence. Luther’s head filled with the restorative fumes from the strong coffee made in a flaking, battered pot. He gathered his courage. This was the day, the time, he thought, to try. Maud had closed the door to the room, since his presence there could well get her expelled. But the act made Luther wonder if her closing the door indicated she too wanted ‘to do it.’ ‘I have nothing else to offer you,’ she said. She seemed uneasy. ‘Unless you drink tea on top of coffee. I have lemon.’ ‘Oh no, next time maybe. Anyway, I take my tea straight.’ Maud smiled. ‘In these rooms, which I share with a beautiful upper-class girl, my other roommate, Liz Becker, and I are not allowed to be so casual about tea. It’s not a drink with Minna, it’s a ceremony. If you don’t see it through from the beginning to end you seriously affect the quality of the … of the “potation,” I think is the word.’ ‘What’s a potation?’ ‘An elaborate drink, I believe.’

  They were fencing for time, not caring about what they said. ‘Simple as that? Then why not say drink?’

  It was a foolish question. Luther wondered why he had asked. He supposed he was feeling irritable because he didn’t know how to start what he had in mind to do. Waiting for the right moment, he wondered, ‘Why do I want to go to bed with her? Do I want to see her undressed, without her weird, cover-all clothes?’ He decided it must be a desire to see those great breasts unbound. He was curious about how a girl so bountifully endowed with both brains and flesh would behave during the act of sex. He felt no stirrings of love for her. ‘How could I?’ he asked himself. But his curiosity suspended all logic.

  Holding the cups with dregs of coffee in them, they sat, looking inquiringly at each other. Luther was trying to decide on a strategy. Having twice before had intercourse with girls he had suspected of being virgins, he knew of only two approaches: a rough, determined strategy that had succeeded well with a handsome girl in Greenwich Village, who then turned out to be far more experienced than he; and the shy, diffident non-approach that had worked with a timid girl in the choir of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they were both born and raised.

  But his successful advance may have frightened the little soprano, because she would never see him again. Luther debated both modes and then, fortunately, hit upon a third. He smiled his wide, Greek boy’s white-toothed engaging smile and said, ‘Maud, would you consider … ah, um, coupling with me?’ ‘Coupling?’ ‘Yes. Well, I chose the word because it seems to go well with potation. I’ve finished my coffee, by the way.’ ‘Want some more?’ ‘No. No, thank you. What I’d really like is for you to take off your clothes so we can make love—that is,’ he said with self-conscious hesitation, ‘if you want to make love with me.’

  Maud stood up. The cup rang in its saucer as she planted her feet heavily on the wooden floor. Luther felt her looking down at him but could not bring himself to look up. He felt overwhelmed by embarrassment and uncertainty. ‘I would like … to try it,’ Maud said. Luther looked up to see her staring at him. ‘But I’ve never done it before—never been asked to, to be honest. My idea is to do it with someone—and I must admit, Luther, that I like you very much—in the dark where you—anyone—would not be able to see clearly what I look like with my clothes off. As I am. I know what I look like. Not much. Or maybe, too mu
ch. Not pretty.’

  When she said in her artless, gravelly voice that she had feelings for him, Luther stood up and put his arms around her, feeling small, insufficient and tender toward her honesty, her unburdening. She stood stolidly and did not respond in any way. ‘Was she thinking of all the light in the room?’ he wondered. The shade on the window was white and porous; he could see no way of darkening the room. He debated retreat, in deference to her wishes, but he found he wanted to see what there was to see under her tentlike shirt and under the starched whatever-it-was that bound her breasts. ‘I want to make love to her,’ he thought, and at that moment was suddenly persuaded that he felt love for her. ‘I want you,’ Luther said, trying to suggest by the simplicity of the sentence that it was the inner Maud, not the envelope of flesh that he desired. This was only partly true.

  Maud locked the door and pulled down the inadequate shade. They undressed. She lay on her back on the narrow bed in the alcove. There seemed to be no room beside her so Luther lay down, gently, on top of her. Thus positioned, there was no time or room for the usual preliminaries. He felt heavy and awkward, his head resting on her chest, which, to his surprise, was bony, her breasts having fallen heavily to her sides. ‘I’ll be gentle. Don’t worry.’ Maud said nothing. She shut her eyes as though she were patiently awaiting the arrival of a bullet. She put her hands on Luther’s head, smoothing his curls. ‘Wonderful ears,’ she said.

  After the first, violent, athletic, pleasureless act for Maud was over, they lay on their sides looking at each other. ‘A consummation devoutly to be wished,’ said Maud, grinning at Luther, who did not immediately recognize the line and thought perhaps the poet in Maud had produced it for the occasion. ‘Anyone likely to come home?’ Luther asked. ‘No, it’s a good time for this,’ said Maud. ‘Liz and Minna have gone out to lunch, and then to a picture taking.’ There was a long pause. Then Maud said suddenly, to Luther’s discomfort, ‘How do I look to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. Maud decided he knew what she meant. ‘You know, it’s strange, but I don’t see my looks anymore. I’ve decided that no one who looks like me can live forever within sight of her own body. I have to look away, to stay curled within myself, like a fetus. From there, I imagine myself looking out of a lovely face, like Minna’s, or Hedy Lamarr’s.’ Luther, stunned by her candor, said nothing. ‘Myopia helps. My inward vision is sharpened by my failure to see out. No blurring. I look in, beyond my skin, to the beauty buried in me.’ Luther stared at the blotched dormitory ceiling as she talked. He was unable to say something reassuring, to say, although he thought to say it, that he was able to see the poet within when he looked at her. His secret about her was his own. In the half hour they had been on the bed he had discovered the source of his attraction to her: he loved Maud’s breasts. He felt pillowed and cherished by the formless flowing flesh, surrounded and bolstered when he gathered those monstrous yet hospitable structures into his hands and then put his head down into their damp, chasmal midst.

  They both lay silent. They had tired themselves out with their first unrewarding coupling. Maud’s disappointment had made her phlegmatic. Luther’s renewed need died away and left him without resources. He decided on an academic subject. ‘You’re Professor Berry’s star in that Metaphysical Poets course. You must be pleased. I envy you.’ ‘I don’t know. He liked my second paper better than the one on Herbert. That’s about the whole of it.’ ‘You’ll probably pull an A.’ ‘Never. With all that work I’ll be lucky to get a B minus or some such negative grade.’ Luther had no more conversation to offer. He decided he had better get out of the girls’ dorm and back across the street. As he got up he said, ‘I enjoyed it.’ ‘What?’ ‘The sex. The beginning. Next time …’ ‘I too. You know, I suspect I care a lot for you, Luther.’ He said, ‘You are a bright girl, and a good poet to wit. I care for you too.’

  Maud smiled. ‘My mother always used to say, “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.”’ ‘You’re a good girl too,’ Luther said. ‘And beautiful,’ said Maud. Luther put on his pants and shirt, laced up his snow boots, kissed her cheek and said, ‘And beautiful too.’ He pulled on his jacket, turned the key, went out the door and crept down the stairs.

  Almost eleven years to the day of that consummation, on a cold morning before Christmas, 1950, Maud woke at five from a dream in which Martha Graham or Doris Humphrey, one of those two, a pliant stick of a figure, glided across an exotic landscape spotted with alligators. Shuddering from the memory, Maud got up, closed the window upon the gray New York City air, and made her way to the bathroom, where she squatted heavily on the toilet, and then neglected to wipe herself. Brushing her teeth struck her as too much of an effort. She poured two fingers of Lavoris and moved the sweet liquid around her furry teeth with her tongue. Feeling suddenly defiant she swallowed, gagged and threw up into the toilet.

  In the kitchen she sat at the table, wearing her long shapeless gray sweater over her nightgown, her feet wrapped in the bed quilt. Then she summoned up the energy to stand, opened the oven door and lit the gas. Little blasts of heat warmed her outstretched hands. Across the room stood a pleated iron radiator, stone cold. She left the door of the oven open and started to boil water for coffee on the stove’s one working burner.

  Usually the mailman came at nine, the high point of her mornings. He could be heard dropping letters into the slotted boxes assigned to the house’s four tenants. Maud waited for the sound, drinking the acrid black coffee, eating piece after piece of toast she cooked in the oven and buttered with uncolored margarine. Her lined white pad and fountain pen sat on the knife-scarred white oilcloth that covered the table’s gashes. The pad was small and came equipped with a heavy sheet of ruled paper, which she always inserted between the top sheet and the next one to give her writing a formal rectitude when she was copying over a poem. The flip-up cover said the Ace pad was intended for CORRESPONDENCE and was made of FINE-WEAVE LINEN. Once she had purchased such a pad and then found she could write or copy on no other kind of paper. ‘Disorder become order,’ she told herself as she entered words on the copybook line.

  When nothing came through her pen to the pad, no image, no sound from her ear of a rhythm pressing to become a line, no word around which, for no reasons, a cluster of words would form, she spent her time adding to the destruction of the oilcloth, digging the blunt point of the Waterman into it. The shiny surface peeled away under pressure, leaving bare the brown, woven backing. Occupied in this way, Maud created abstract patterns, each day’s excavation adding a new area of destructive decoration until, when she took a page from her pad and put it down on the oilcloth over the design and tried to write on it, she produced a dimpled text, a nonsensical palimpsest of depth and variety.

  Now she tried it. She wrote a string of words that had come to her as the pen encountered the paper: ‘alone and lonely, sole and solitary, last and lasting + + +’—the pen caught in an indentation and stopped. She smiled at the barrier. ‘It’s a subtle form of censorship,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m mistaken in these words. The oilcloth freezes me into silence, blocking my prosaic passage.’ She dropped the pen and stared down at her fat, extended fingers, the nails bitten to a red line below their tips, white with cold. Other obstructions besides those on the oilcloth came to her. She thought of Luther, to whom other people’s words came so easily. He was what, in his craft, was called ‘a quick study.’ In the cold air before her she watched him toss his lovely head, hearing how the words he had learned in one reading flowed from his mouth, his charming, mobile mouth taking on, in passage, the accents of wit and intelligence not his own. Then the warm strand of air from the oven wiped him away and Maud smiled at his disappearance. ‘I can’t think about him anymore this morning. It makes me feel worse,’ Maud said to the air. She looked back at her sheet of paper and saw that the fountain pen had expelled a blue-black blot of ink. The oilcloth had received the excess and had promoted its spread into the shape of a nigrescent mushroom. She sa
id aloud, ‘All this happening instead of poetry,’ and pushed the inky paper into the oven. Slowly it heated, curled, turned in upon itself in a kind of dance of death and then burned away with a thin blue flame. Maud held her hands out to it. She took another sheet, found a place on the oilcloth that was unmarked and sat for some time, staring at the page.

  Nothing came. Everything eluded her, something that happened often since she had been left alone, since the cold of this winter had reached into her bones and her mind. Six months ago—Was it only six months? she wondered—before Florence took the twins, Kenneth and Spencer, with her to New Baltimore, she had been able to listen to the boys when she searched for a word, to their unison babblings and chorusing, to pick out from their inchoate noises the sounds of a word she needed. Now the warm air, having obliterated Luther, produced the twins, her beautiful curly haired sons, standing before her in their short-legged sailor suits, a summer vision in the freezing kitchen. She could not remember the word she had been seeking. She gazed at her little boys as if she did not know them and they, in turn, said nothing and so were not the help they used to be. Now she could remember what it was she wanted from the airy twins. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. At once the pressing need returned. Yesterday she had begun a sonnet about the inconceivability of safety. She sought a word: ‘Haven? harborage? No.’ The one that hovered vaguely in her head eluded her. ‘How much of all this is the pointing of one’s inner ear to catch the sound of a shifty word?’ Sometimes she thought she had heard it, but it was too faint to catch, to pin it to the page in a stroke, before it escaped her into the obscurant air. ‘It begins with an h. No, perhaps an s? Asylum? No.’ Then, with great luck it came, in a miraculous epiphany of perfection: sanctuary. ‘Let the line proceed,’ she said aloud to the heat of the oven.