Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  These months away from my practice have slowed and softened me, and now that I try to use my body again, I find its power has spread to my shivering fringe. The waves slap my thighs like a man’s broad palm before I dive in. At first I would go only a few meters out and bob there like a sullen duck, but I ventured farther the next time, rolling onto my back and righting myself again for a slow crawl. Now I have started the work of distancing myself from land. Happily, I lost my old swimming costume somewhere in Albania; those things are good enough for sunbathing, but I would have sunk like a fat stone wrapped in wool if I’d actually tried to swim. My old cotton romper does the trick; it’s a larger version of something the children would wear, shapeless but light enough in the water.

  The waves calm far enough out, and I find that if I keep my eyes just above the surface, I lose the land entirely. This is where the poet Shelley went over, his friends reaching from the boat as he gazed oblivious toward nothing in particular. My rebelling mind presents an image of the car doors, which must have bowed grotesquely against the river. They say the drowning soul feels no pain. Or so they say, anyway, to me.

  Going under, I feel my thoughts compressing between my ears. The water clasps me like a strangling hand, shocking every hair to brittle attention. I swim through its upended gravity, crawling away from sunlight.

  I taught them to listen to the pulsing point under their ribs, to unfurl from it like a banner, taught them to run and leap, to make themselves into columns so perfect they might stand forever. I taught them how to consume beauty, to take it in and make the dance it gave them, an art that can exist only as beauty can, as life itself, in a moment. I taught them all of that, but I never taught them how to swim.

  In Darmstadt, Elizabeth finds herself with time on her hands and news of the world

  It would come after days spent rolling merrily along, the lady observing the passing scene with a cup of tea and feeling more of a stranger on solid ground than in the gentle rocking cars: an accident, the whole world bursting in a magnesium flash as the train bucks like a bull from the rails, earth drawn across the window like a curtain and the lady’s teacup stuck bloody in her wrist, her body so soft against the things that once served it, the worst of it not the shock or pain, but the simple realization that her whole world could be tipped from its axis, that she could find herself flung into a new state of being, her legs crushed under a table, the world’s blooming orchestra rendered to a tinny buzz. It was how Elizabeth imagined it, anyway.

  That sense—that the planet could violently revolt at any moment—was precisely the speculative thrill Elizabeth came to crave when she sat down to read the daily news. After the story about the train derailment, she spent the rest of the morning in delicious agony, fantasizing the feeling of her body being thrown across every room she entered. These brief sojourns into crisis were more tantalizing than fiction and simpler to attain, but she found she slowly grew dependent on them and needed the newspaper more and more. She started milling around the neighborhood grocery until the boy came by with the late edition. When she gave him her money, she would hold one hand with the other to keep him from seeing how she shook with anticipation.

  Just the month before, a man in Mühlhausen had taken the lives of his wife and children and then gone on to murder strangers in the street. The unadorned fact was enough to get Elizabeth going, but she was thrilled to find the paper printed every detail: he wielded a pair of army revolvers with two hundred cartridges in reserve; he was calm and smiling when they captured him, though he was beaten almost to death; the children were found bludgeoned in their beds, his wife’s throat slit in the hall; he happily confessed every bit of it as the police dragged him away. He was the town’s mild schoolteacher and knew most of the children he slaughtered. It was an evil thing that came upon him, but the law could not discern what inspired it, and he wasn’t ill with drink or spurred by circumstance. After she read it all, Elizabeth had to lie down, her heart pounding in her chest.

  For days, she watched every edition to see if some detail would emerge that might better explain it, but subsequent articles only confused her more. The man wore a veil over his face, in letters he spoke of wanting the Devil; none of it made sense to her. At least when unsinkable ships went down, there were icebergs to blame. Or when the Windsor caught fire in New York and Elizabeth had to run with the children through the throng of sirens, delirious with smoke and fear as ladies fell from the sky like squalling myths—at least with the fire, there was probable cause, a lamp, a drape. These were things she could avoid, lessons she could learn.

  But this! She hated the feeling of helplessness, waiting for the lesson that would never come. With the murderer in Mühlhausen, she felt as if she were witnessing the beginning of a troubling modern trend.

  Just as the papers seemed to turn from the crime, the airship L2 burst over Johannisthal, killing twenty-eight. Elizabeth exhausted herself, staring at the pictures of the craft’s aluminum ribs drilled into the earth, of the bodies of boys hauled off on shrouded sleds. She couldn’t look away.

  She tried to tell Max about her repulsive attraction. He was usually very understanding of her moods, having often stated that feminine sensitivity was ideal for the creation of great art. Even though Elizabeth didn’t see sensitivity as a feminine trait exactly and also did not view herself as an artist, rather as a technician and a teacher, she appreciated his attempt to place her in the constellation of his own theories, finding her in the golden telescope of his intellect and making a note of her as the wayward, looping planet she was.

  As it happened, however, Max was the worst person she could have told. He kept interrupting to ask why she didn’t simply stop reading the papers, why she didn’t focus on softer stories. Eventually, she gave up on explaining herself, and allowed him to pour her a thimble of bitter Underberg. They sat together on the porch and watched evening pass them by.

  As she settled more comfortably into a stuffed wicker chair, her mind drew idly to Romano. She wondered if he had seen the same news, of the murder or the airship. Perhaps he had read of something equally stunning closer to home. Tragedy seemed to only attract him. He spoke of how, as a boy, he walked the seawall to see the fresh shipwrecks, enjoying the sound of hulls wailing against the shoals in the persistent tide. Perhaps she could go to him in Italy, visiting macabre sites along the way.

  Leaving Darmstadt was her most seductive fantasy, but it was truly impossible. The girls needed someone to keep Max in check; one more long trip, and he would have them marching in lockstep. And anyway, such a trip would require her to accept that the horrors were so near. She was happy to speculate on tragedy but preferred not to be its neighbor. And so she stayed, and read the paper.

  Isadora finds water to be a pleasant companion, one that accepts all who are willing to walk into it

  An idea was once presented to me by a man in a bar. He was a Christian man and a sailor, and he silenced the room with two hands to announce that we are obliged all our lives to embody only one of three forms: a sea, a storm, or a boat. Obviously he felt that the triumvirate fit nicely into these categories, with God the Storm, Christ the Sea, and the Spirit navigating the twain, but he noted that his idea had a broader application in love and war.

  Immediately I claimed to be a clipper ship, propelled by my own agency and guile; this was called down by the assembled, and the sailor pointed out that a boat would never speak first. Undaunted, I claimed the sea next, vast and roiling, a resilient bed for rest and death, accepting the world’s comets and slipping cliffsides, its poets and steamships, and holding it all without judgment. They nearly laughed me out of the bar for trying to suggest that I would harbor anything but myself.

  And so that leaves the storm! Violent on the liquid plain, wrecking ships and dumping murk without thought or conscience, destroying everything in its path. They say it’s your friends who know you the best, but drunks have a way with your worst.

  I’ve lately found it easier to con
sider more or less impassively the idea of being pulled out with the swells and dragged under, waterlogged and sunk like a true poet, one foot wedged under the wing of a shipwrecked prow, the rest of me prized away by fish and larger creatures. The ocean plays a little sleight of hand as the thought of a peaceful death holds my attention long enough for the waves to bring me back to shore.

  Stumbling to my feet, I find myself shivering cold and far from where I went in. My cape is gone and I must walk up the coast in my romper, looking for it. The thing is thick jacquard and should be easy enough to spot, as it resembles a beaded tablecloth. My romper soaked and sticking to me doesn’t make life any merrier. If I’ve walked by the cape already, it already slipped from the rail and was buried under a thin inch of sand. If not that, children may have taken it for a bit of fun, or, worse, one of the well-meaning women folding towels for the resorts weighed the heavy fabric in her hand, figured a guest left it by accident, and surrendered it to her employer, requiring me to approach every concierge desk in order to inquire, where they will naturally have me arrested and taken away, and a journalist will publish a photograph of the saltwater puddle I leave on the court bench.

  Before I resign myself to cut a dripping path for the plaza, a man emerges from a covered porch, holding the cape like a banner and shouting his apologies, making a show of shaking it out as he runs and showing me both sides upon his arrival, as if he is about to perform a magic trick. The man is thirty at most, with a slight figure and a nervous facial tic that makes it look as if he is using intermittent pursing pressure to soothe a cut between his lips. He looks guiltily about, and at first I wonder if I caught him in an impropriety with the cape: beating time upon it to accompany a Fillmore march, draping it about the shoulders of a bad dog, shredding its ends to fill an ornamental pillowcase, boiling it in water and drinking its tea or similar. Of course he must only feel ashamed to see me in the romper, which has wedged itself into every one of my wedgible parts. Handing over the garment, he bows and runs away, a loping run across the sand, looking as if he has never run anywhere in his adult life. The whole thing passes without a word between us.

  Back at the house, I find three messages tucked into the doorframe from Duse, despite the fact that I saw her already this morning. The wooden gate claps, and I go out to find her messenger boy, stopped in his tracks halfway up the path. When I ask him to tell her to expect me in the afternoon, he drops a fourth letter and runs. It’s the second time I’ve had this treatment today, despite the fact that I have been sober all the while and it is not quite noon. I go to her before she puts the whole postal service on notice.

  Duse has her baubles out again. Fat glass drops hang from horsehair thread in the window over the sink, collecting the light and dispersing it in rays: red chases orange across the yellow-hinged cabinets, and emerald takes a seat on a footstool in the blue corner. Her shoulders are pinned by violet. We sit and watch each other in silence, which started as a game and is lately becoming more serious. The violet light grazes her collarbone. Her expressions mirror mine, fading from one to the next.

  She has made it her business to know Viareggio, starting with which mothers will spare their sons for little tasks around the house in exchange for her occasional presence in theirs. The boys bring her sandwiches and deliver messages, they tell her the best route to the beach and the busiest cafés. She probably has them spy on me. She wants to know the town because she plans to die here. I’ve seen her sample the earth, crouching to pinch the sand and observing it like a scientist before bringing it to her mouth. If only we could all be so fastidious.

  At Oldway, Paris takes on a new project with the optimistic idea that the occupied mind is never lost

  He had always wanted to put the aeroplane hanger in the Balkans, ever since he heard of the danger. Some wartime intrigue would add a thrill to the venture, and even when peace arrived to the area, Paris held out hope that things would go sideways again. As he waited, however, the local workforce petitioned him to stay in Paignton. The men had heard talk of airborne heroes, of wild aerobatics in Russia and record-breaking solo flights in France, and even a pistol battle between flying aces in the Mexican war. They wanted to bring some fame home to their wives. Paris certainly understood the impulse, and so he allowed them to convince him to change his plans.

  The local men insisted on framing the steel hangar themselves, promising to save Paris the hassle of an outside contractor. They installed a pair of triple-hinge barn doors that, despite their impressive size, still didn’t have the proper clearance. He had to bring someone in to reframe the door and explain the dimensions again to his local crew. The men were unable to believe how wide he kept insisting the aeroplane would be; each man thought it would be only as wide as the bed in which he lay every night to dream of his future in the air.

  Once the proper door was installed and the frame was set, Paris had the first craft delivered, a slim monoplane named Cigare. A group of twenty men began arriving daily from nearby farms, accepting apprentice wages plus tea and lunch to keep everything up.

  They all wanted their hands on the little plane. Every morning they took apart the entire engine. They worked in silence, oiling and shining its piston bolts, replacing its hinges though the old ones still shone from the last round. They used teak oil to swab the strips of citron wood rolled over the carriage frame, clearing buildup from its fittings. Once a week an old woodworker would arrive from town to advise them where they might add slips and braces to guard against the cracking influence of ocean air. The others would listen as they worked, polishing the steering column or securing the metal trim over the seating compartment. They took long breaks to admire it with the pride of fortress guards around their single beloved cannon.

  Paris was charmed at first. Before too long, however, he came to realize that the men had gotten too attached. They had endless questions about the plane’s origin and materials and the details of its aerodynamic function, but nobody seemed to appreciate the fact that he wanted to actually take the thing out. Though they had arrived with daredevil dreams, they lost their will to test the craft once they came to know the intimacies of its operation. In short, the men had fallen in love.

  Their loathing and judgment only grew once Paris hired an instructor, a Swiss who had been involved in Cigare’s creation yet seemed to be refreshingly unromantic about the whole thing. The men were outright hostile to the Swiss and made cruel fun of his punctuality. Paris started taking his lessons in the hangar office, away from the others. They watched him through the windows.

  In Viareggio, after a lunch of fried squash blossoms, Duse being very interested in her own garden as of late

  Though everyone else has been polite enough to avoid it, Duse assumes her familiarity well enough to assume she can ask after the accident. She has built her career on apprehending and appropriating the pain of others, a hard habit to break among friends.

  “The river,” she says, trying to prompt some response.

  “I’d rather tell you how awful Paris was to come and try to haul me out of Greece. I thought he was a dream at first, but my dreams are never so administrative in their bearing.”

  She shudders, thinking either of the river or of Paris Singer, whom she hates to talk about. “We should have some music.” She had the piano tuned when she learned I was coming, and she also hired a pianist, a nice enough man who is around here somewhere, maybe in the garden.

  A bead of indigo light settles onto her torso, eclipsing snout and stomach. She is freed of the corset she worked in for years, sweating in stays under stage lights. Today she is cocooned in ivory linen, with a shawl that drags in the dust as she walks precisely along the line between regal and absurd. Her white collar is attached with three smart buttons up the side of her neck. The effect is of a nurse committed to the very asylum that had previously employed her.

  “It is quite comfortable, though,” she says, picking through my thoughts like a seamstress rifling through a bin of silk sc
raps, holding this one up to the light, then dropping it and reaching for the next. “And how was your swim? Buoyed on millions of tears, I assume?”

  “I falsely sensed a shoal, and nearly drowned going down to touch it.”

  “Is that so?”

  “In the course of my own movement I confused my direction and dove deeper as the water closed in.”

  She holds her hand to her throat.

  “Only keeping still would save me then, waiting for the air in my lungs to bear me up.”

  She struggles elegantly to lean forward and I allow her to take me into her arms, wondering how it is we can ever stand to be apart. In times like these I forget our past. In Florence, she was staging Rosmersholm with Ted, and they forced me to translate their awful fights, as she didn’t know much English at the time and he refused to retain a word of Italian. He would scream that if she interfered with another scene, he would put her in the ground; I would tell her that he was overwhelmed by her talent and would do anything to foster her artistic aim so long as she gave him a moment to think. They would grin madly and go a little longer before breaking down again. The two of them hated each other so much that I was certain they were lovers. Deirdre was there by then, and a nurse named Marie, who had agreed to work on credit and had come to immediately regret that decision. Between Ted’s agonies and the daily tantrum from Duse or Deirdre, or both, it was a wonder any love remained at all. But we were younger then, and love could come and go.