“And the book? How did you find it?”
“Once upon a time,” I thought a joke would change my mood, “I walked into the study and found my father leaning against the wall by the window reading a book with a green cover. When I came in he quickly closed it; I remember still the sound of his clapping it shut. He put the book in an open space on the lowest shelf and told me that it was a book I wasn’t allowed to read. It was the only green book on the shelf, surrounded by drab black and brown leather spines of uninteresting others. It looked like a fresh sprig in blasted ground. I couldn’t stop staring at it, noticing it every time I walked into his office. It had a sort of gravitational pull on me.”
“It sounds like he wanted you to read it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That he made such a show of it so that you’d feel tempted to read it, put it on the lowest shelf so you could reach it; he made it obvious which book you were forbidden to open.”
We walked into the study. There on the desk the novel thickly sat—thought it was not so thick, then. One hundred pages, maybe less. There on the desk sat the novel’s thick promise. I opened a drawer and pulled from it the sheaf of letters my father wrote me from his trip. I put them on the desk and pulled out the chair for Lydia to sit down.
“I thought you might want to read these. You don’t have to—”
“What are they?”
“These are the letters my father wrote me from a long trip he took.”
Lydia untied the ribbon holding them together and opened the first envelope.
I left her alone to read them. I didn’t want to see her face as she read the letters; I didn’t want to hover ghostlike over the ghosts those letters were to me. I walked to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, poured myself a glass, the bouquet sudden and diffuse in the room when I took my first sip, sat in a chair, and stared at the wall while I waited. A blank wall gives the mind more fully over to its distraction, a movie with no plot cast through the eyes onto the screen, edited by images that repeat, as the glass of wine in my hand became another evening, a moment forgotten from last spring, when at Olin’s house, slightly drunk, I knocked an empty wineglass off the table and it shattered against the floor and Lydia, looking down at the shards of glass on the wood, tipsily said, “That’s how it begins.”
When the glass was empty, I filled it again. I filled one for Lydia, and took it to her. She put down the last letter, placed it neatly on top of the others, and left them face down on the desk. “Your father thought he was Orpheus.”
“I think he thought everyone was Orpheus. Or that Orpheus was some unrealized potential in us all. To be a singer. To sing a song that opened a door into another world. He thought of words as passages, not meanings; doorways, not definitions. He thought words kept open the wall between the living and the dead. I think he thought one could escape through a word. And enter. If he could sing the right words in the right order, sing them in the right way, some kind of multiplying melody, then he could sing his way into death and bring home my mother and sister. He was convinced, you know. He was absolutely convinced. He thought Orpheus wasn’t a man but a symbol, a type of us all. Orpheus was who one could be—” I stopped, aghast to sound so much like him.
“It’s hard to believe he could believe such a thing. A professor, a rational man. Your mother’s death must have broken something in him.”
“Reason’s plank.”
Lydia looked at me. “You had a hard childhood, not just a lonely one.”
“A child doesn’t know it’s hard; I didn’t. It was dark, that’s all. Filled with shadows, mysteries. I loved my father very much. I loved him more the crazier he became. I thought he was magical. And wise. I’d listen to him practice the myth, practice his singing, his chanting, an awful music that hardly sounded like music, dark and rhythmic, guttural, almost violent—but it didn’t scare me, or it scared me in a way that made sense, and so it didn’t scare me. I didn’t know to be afraid of the way he was crazy.”
“And then he left?”
“And then one day he was gone.”
“Weren’t you angry?”
“I knew it would happen. He never told me he would leave, but I knew it. I knew he was practicing, preparing for a journey. The words he studied, I knew they meant he’d leave. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t even surprised. Sad, I guess—I was already sad.”
Something quiet in Lydia’s face grew quieter; her whole face silence. “Fathers are an awful fate.” Her face looked ashen.
“Fathers are just an introduction to fate; it becomes awful afterward, when fate is what you try to escape.”
“What is your fate?”
I ignored the question. “My father came home a different man. He never spoke of what happened on that island. He would look at me in a way that I felt I could not ask him. It was secret.” I thought about fate, how one doesn’t know what it is, but only that it must be run away from, fled, and that fleeing it is always running directly toward it. “Father came home with a limp. His skin seemed more taut against him, as if he had been partially embalmed. He had a slightly jaundiced look. He kept teaching, but it didn’t go well. He seemed as feeble as he actually was. He . . . dwindled. And then he died.”
“I’m sorry.”
Those three syllables rebounded through my head, a drumbeat repeating itself, growing louder as the words disappeared. The white poplar scratched against the window, pen on glass. I wanted to be able to say don’t be sorry but I couldn’t. I couldn’t lie to her. “What I wanted to show you,” trying to gather myself, trying to still the quaver in my words, “was the book, the green book, filled with tales. My childhood friend.” I went over to the bookshelf. My hand by old habit reached to the middle of the lowest shelf, but the book was missing. It was gone. “It’s vanished,” I said, a desperate helplessness uncontrollable in my voice. Vanished is how the moment felt to me—not that I had lost the book, not that I had been reading it in the armchair and left it on a table in the living room, not that I had lent it to a friend or student and simply forgotten the fact. Orpheus had peeled himself off the canvas and stolen the book to keep his lonely head company in the afterlife—he had carried it away in his mouth. No natural explanations came to me; I felt riddled, not as by a child’s riddle book, but riddled as in filled with holes. “It’s vanished, it’s vanished—” I kept saying it to myself over and over again, and the empty space on the shelf opened the empty space in me, that absent space, as shocking as reading a novel and finding, hundreds of pages deep, a signature of blank pages, a missing chapter, after which the novel continues, missing characters one had come to like, to rely on, even to love. My hand was shaking, still held out toward the shelf. Lydia came behind me. She put her hand on my shaking hand, but the tremor didn’t stop, it just descended deeper in me—more pressure in the fault of my earthquake life. She leaned her forehead against the back of my neck and said, “I won’t vanish.” She said these words but I could not see her say them; I could not see her eyes; I could not see her lips form the words. She spoke them behind me, as if the words existed in the air by themselves, spoken by anyone, anonymous. I wanted to say it, but I could not say it. I could not say it, but I knew it was true. Everyone vanishes.
CHAPTER 5
WHEN THE TENSES SHIFT, WHEN THE TENSES BLEND, memory stitches into yesterday’s stitch, and time cinches shut. Not only shut. It loosens, frays. The Fates clap their hands in glee. The mind’s loose hem dragging behind it across the ground, catching the salvage in the selvage: leaf’s underside, light on water, a single lost pearl. A day repeats its pattern unexpectedly: the bee climbs in the bluebell that vibrates with its tune, the train’s horn enters the tunnel; the hail crushes the mint, the scent of her hair when she pulls out the pin; frost on the window, sun’s chromatic circles through the camera’s lens. Echo chamber filled with words fills with words again; Narcissus looking out his eyes to see in the pond his eyes. No words can keep him from drowning. We cannot speak to o
urselves and wake ourselves up, these words we say to ourselves that are the same words everyone speaks to themselves, these words in us but not our own, words that can describe the butterfly’s plashless flight between the rose blossoms, words that can describe the butterfly’s tattered wing torn by the rosebush’s thorns; we speak them, but they will not wake us up, they will not stop us from bending down our mouths to the water to kiss our own reflection. Who is this I who says I? Who saying I thinks I? Who is this poor mirror-self who walks down the department hall so eerily quiet in the summer months, no sound of the copier machine endlessly repeating pages, no partially open doors from which voices escape in protest or explanation, no proliferation of endless detail, a girl’s voice saying “the worm rapes the rose,” no weary voice in return saying, “no, no—.” Only the sound of my keys knocking against each other as I take them from my pocket, only the countless repetition of putting the key in the lock, of turning the key, of the rusty mechanism working once again, of the door opening, of the stifling air rushing into the cooler hall, of the feeling in my eyes at seeing my desk in its perfect order, in seeing my window, the glance of green through the pane, of the bookshelf, only the same weight in my eyes of knowing it all in advance, of seeing again what has been seen before, fate revealing itself in repetition, the copier machine of fate.
My mind—it is an exuberance of distraction. I cannot help it, when I hear out on the green a dog barking as it anxiously waits for the young woman to throw the blue disc across the lawn’s expanse, I see without seeing poor Bitsy collapsed on the floor and hear what in my chair’s voice was no doubt the nervous seed of a tone whose tendrils latch on only to grief; then I hear again as I heard before the dogs on my block yelping, howling, a canine frenzy affecting each, and looking out the front window, seeing a fox trot—wary but somehow calm in its wariness—down the center of the street; and its orange tail that ends in a dark tip . . . a sunset, but when did it occur? What plot was it part of? What chapter in what book? A poem in which a dog lies down across the sky? The fox, I remember it; it ran down the middle of the street, leisurely, looking from side to side; and then I remember the sunset, that sunset, that summer; I remember that sunset pouring itself through the open window of the hotel room, Lydia standing up naked from the bed and running quickly but languidly in front of the window, one arm almost covering her breasts, looking outside as she went by, looking back over her shoulder as she fled, or seemed to flee, down the carpeted hall that made her escape silent.
I sat down at my desk to read over the last pages of Moby-Dick I soon had to teach but the pages were blank. My eye couldn’t see the words. Lydia’s naked body kept walking past the window; on one page I was in the room she was in, and on the next page I was watching her body move past the window as I stood outside.
It was her idea. To get away before the academic year began. “A long weekend on the coast,” she said. “It will do us good.” I didn’t especially like to travel, finding it hard to sleep in rooms other than my own, the noises and scents, even the feeling of the air that makes the foreignness of sleep more foreign, more threatening, removing the comfort of waking up to a room one recognizes before one recalls that one is oneself, that this room is familiar because it is mine, and if it is mine, then I must be me. But I agreed; I was in love.
Lydia planned everything. She picked the town and the hotel, and we drove off in her old convertible through the countryside for hours and hours, listening to music that the air rushing by made almost indiscernible, not talking; no need to talk, until a new music interposed, and hearing it before we saw it, we drove over a rise, and the ocean stretched beyond us to the horizon line; a line the eye draws to convince the mind the world has an edge just as a page has an edge, the waves crashing against the pebbled beach sending out to us its predictable crescendo, its pulse that roars.
“The brine in the air . . . do you smell it? It reminds me of being a little girl.” Nostalgia filled Lydia’s voice. She turned the music down but still spoke loudly.
“But you didn’t grow up by the sea.”
“I know. But it reminds me of being a little girl anyway. That air,” she breathed deeply, “that makes possibility into a scent. What can’t happen?” and she laughed, and taking one hand off the wheel, let the air sift through her fingers as she raised her arm above her.
The seaside town took a picture of itself printed on postcards in the spinning displays on the sidewalks outside the “General Store” and again outside the “Olde Tyme Shoppe,” where one could buy polished stones, three dollars a bag. In the window of the taffy store the taffy machine churned away, two arms rotating around each other, the candy a milky white band in an oblong circle always threatening to break and fall on the ground or fling itself against a wall, but miraculously never breaking, the thinnest strands swept back into the machine’s motion, so that children outside the window stood with their mouths agog while their soft-serve melted, dripping down their filthy fingers onto their toes. T-shirt shops: 1 for $12, 2 for $20, 3 for $25. We strolled through the town hand in hand. Lydia seemed transported by the very things that struck me as tawdry, dazzled by the glitter on the faces of children walking through the streets with butterflies painted on their cheeks; she saw beauty where I saw none, had convinced myself none existed—the trinkets in the trinket shop: toy slot machines, UFO tops with lights that flashed as they spun, candy rings with cherry-ruby gems . . . She’d wander into stores and browse, not to buy, but to wonder, or feel wonder, a childlike gaze that made the miniature replicas of the town’s two-story church and the “rare” green stones found along the coast marvels of the lost world. She held my hand like I was one of the marvels, as if I were included; and so I began to see as she saw. We walked past a watch-repair store (the sign read PETER’S WATCH—& Doll—REPAIR) in whose front window dozens of pocket watches hung, no two telling the same time. One of the watches was turned around so that the face couldn’t be seen, and etched into its brass back in an unsteady, amateur line, a fox asleep in the curve of its tail, the long grass of the field curling over it.
Lydia caught me gazing at it. “I’m going to buy it for you,” she said.
A bell rang when she opened the door. The owner of the store looked up from behind the counter where he sat working, a small magnifying lens attached to his glasses, making his eye look as if it were detached from his head, floating in space.
“May I help you?” he asked in a tone surprisingly mechanical.
“I’d like to buy one of the watches in the window, the one with the fox engraved on the back.” She turned around and pointed at the only watch whose face could be seen. A cacophony of ticking filled the store, each watch and clock marking the seconds for itself, each keeping time in its own world. I felt caught—not in time, but in between time. Each watch counted the hours off one by one, each case remembering the hand that had held it, the hand whose mortality the clock marked second by second until the hand existed no more, but the clock still did, adding up the math of nobody’s demise. On a high shelf a row of dolls. One sitting stiffly in a crinoline pinafore stared down with only one blue eye open.
“I haven’t repaired that one yet; it doesn’t work.”
Lydia smiled. “That’s fine. It doesn’t matter.” And kissing me on the cheek, said, “He doesn’t believe in time anyway.”
A look of disgust passed over the man’s face. Moving from behind the counter, he walked over to the window display, his legs so bowed that he teetered from side-to-side as he walked, the gait of a child’s toy, an automaton. He took the watch down, held it in his palm, and with a look of disgust said, “Ten dollars.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s the worth of the metal. This watch can’t be fixed. It was built by a hobbyist, just a kid fooling around. He thought he could devise a new mechanism that kept its motion perpetually. Foolish kid.” He spat the words out in disgust. “It doesn’t work.”
Lydia handed him a ten-dollar bill and we
left the store, the bell ringing at our departure.
“To the boardwalk,” Lydia said, dragging me by the hand. The day was getting late and the sun was setting. Keeping time to my pace if to nothing else, the pocket watch struck my thigh with every step, a rhythm that made me more conscious of the moment, of holding Lydia’s hand, of her hair swinging in front of her face and hiding it, of the neon lights’ glow in the growing dark as we neared the boardwalk, where carnival rides and games grew illuminated in garish colors, sulfurous yellows within which barkers stood yelling out “three chances for three dollars, win your lady a prize!” in rapid-fire staccato, each more intent on marking his territory out from the men running other booths—throw a token onto a floating boat to win, shoot the water pistol into the clown’s open mouth and win, arm wrestle the robot and win—than in having a customer actually stop and play. Pinball machines clanged and jingled, the spinning numbers clicked into high scores. A child walked by eating cotton candy, his mouth smeared with globs of pink that made his lips look almost blood smeared in the nauseous yellow light.
“Win me something.” Lydia looked at me with eyes exaggeratedly imploring.
I walked over to the ticket booth. The man selling the tickets wore a banker’s visor whose transparent green plastic cast a green shadow across his face. He was very tall, and leaned out his window toward me, and in a loud, slow voice, asked, “May I help you?”
“Five tickets, please.” I gave him five dollars.
He took the money and put it in the cashbox, then counted off five tickets from a huge roll, “one, two, three, four,” crimping each along its perforated line so that he was sure not to make a mistake, and reaching “five,” tore them off. His hand shook slightly as he handed them to me. He had a tattoo on his arm whose faded ink made me realize that he was much older than I’d thought—a heart on fire and written in the flames the name Hazel. “The things kids do,” he said, seeing me eye the mark, and then, pulling his shirt away from his neck, showed me a series of stars within whose constellation floated the name Beatrice. “You want to win your lady something? You do, don’t ya?” I nodded. “Well, let me help you, Chief. Look here, Chief. Most these games you can’t win, you just can’t win ’em.” He coughed into his hand. “You gotta pick right to impress the ladies. Go over there,” pointing with a shaking arm to a booth from which red light poured glaringly out, “and give him three tickets,” he held up three shaking fingers, “which gives you three balls. You gotta break two plates.” He laughed to himself a sickly laugh, as if he were betraying a sacred code. “Oh, they play tricks, they do! They paint cracks on plates made of lead, they put chips in metal plates, make it look like they’re gonna fall apart of themselves. Don’t throw at those, no, don’t throw at them.” Lydia stood behind me, listening. “Look for the blue ones, and aim for those. They’ll be furthest back, looks like they’re the hardest to hit, like you shouldn’t even try. But I tell you, Chief. If the ball even goes close to it the breeze will crack it in half.” He winked at me, leaned closer, and said, “She’s a looker. Win her a prize and if you’re lucky you’ll get lucky. It’s a lucky night.” His laugh turned into a cough almost indistinguishable from the laugh as we walked away.
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky Page 9