by Elise Levine
Is this how we speak? Can You hear? Simple Alice, who Nance loved. Hear how we are Nance too.
* * *
* In medieval Europe, a male anchorite or female anchoress (“ancress”) was a type of religious hermit usually sealed in to a cell (an anchorhold) for the remainder of their life for the purpose of intensive spiritual devotion removed from worldly distractions. Practitioners may have believed they were helping to stabilize—to anchor—the church and society, and the sacrifice was valued during calamitous occurrences, including the Great Mortality, as the plague was then sometimes designated.
Princess Gates
The old woman came out in her nightie, went around back, returned with a ladder.
In the tree, the cat was high up, stuck, yowling.
Streetlamp, tree, streetlamp, tree. Like a picket fence around the neighbourhood.
All the young couple could do, being young, was wring their hands and run them over each other. Their cat liked to climb down from their second-floor balcony and roam.
Marguerite, Bryce. They had quite a lot of sex in those days—every day, and quite a few times every day. And fights and drinks.
The old woman, the landlady, wasn’t beautiful—though her husband’s name was Sweet Daddy. He’d been a pro wrestler. When Marguerite and Bryce were kids they’d seen him in county arenas, cottage country, working the crowds. Now he was old and fronted an alt-country band—Cocaine, cocaine lolloping from the basement in the middle of afternoons.
The old woman was the old woman who rescued the cat.
Marguerite and Bryce loved the cat. Loved.
There were some neo-Nazis who lived nearby but the young couple paid no mind. Sometimes there were protests but Marguerite and Bryce were busy. She washed dishes one night in a pricey joint, broke a tray of Rosenthal. Otherwise, when she waited tables, he’d wait in the apartment, eking out crossword puzzles, hot-kniving hash, waiting for her to get home. When she did, he’d stab his fingers through her purse for cash he’d pay the cab driver with, the liquor-store cashier. Bryce bought the best, regardless of cost.
She’d been pregnant when they first met. She never thought to wonder why he didn’t mind. She was busy with school, work. Her own daddy, mother.
Marguerite took care of things.
There was a lake. Cold, blue. They lived that one whole winter-spring by the fairgrounds. She tried riding a bike, a beater, through the western gates once. They were named after a princess.
The wind was a violence so she had to turn back.
One night Bryce fell. Bang went his head on the ice. Marguerite continued on her way. There were stars but no moon so the light pricked. At the edge of the parkette she stopped. Full stop. She meant it—him. Groaning, Marguerite, Marguerite. She meant it—her.
She got thin. Beautiful in that thin kind of way. Thin as her mother in her seventies would get, years later, tubes stuck in her, congestive heart failure caused by decades of refusing to eat, refusing, fuck you, so long, goodbye.
Hey, Beauty. Here, Beauty Beauty.
But look what this young woman could do. I’m leaving, she one day up and said.
Next. Next.
She has never wanted to return. Not to anything or anyone.
An older woman in a white gown. Streetlamp. Marguerite can hardly stand it. Bike, ice, lake. Bang.
Cat—dead now, right? And young Bryce, bent inside her but she hadn’t minded.
What she has ever really wanted to say has been later.
As Such
Martin sinks into the plush red velvet and waits for Will to follow suit. After they settle, after the house lights go down and the conductor strides on stage to warm applause, Martin takes Will’s hand. They are in Budapest. Will is having a work premiered. The hall is an intimate gilt affair and Martin and Will are seated by the aisle, four rows from the front so Will can leap the stairs onto the stage for his bow. Martin squares his shoulders, spreads his legs so he can graze Will’s knee. The first movement, allegro, clips smartly along. During the second movement, allegro furioso, Will’s fingers death-grip. Martin guesses it’s a late entry of the crotales or maybe a muddy imbalance between woodwinds and string—the kinds of marrings that Will has with limited success trained Martin to hear. Post-performance, though, he never fails to resoundingly deny the existence of such flaws.
Will’s hand-crunching crescendos. Martin nudges and Will lets go. Sorry, he mouths.
Martin smiles. He gets it. Precision, finesse. No mistakes. He and Will have been married four years now, together a total of fourteen, having met in a first-year astronomy course. The prof miscalculated a formula on the board one day and as class finished Martin and Will tripped over each other, veering forth with the correction. Martin and Will refer to the episode as their origin story.
A hush and the final movement begins. Presto, it says in the program. All these sparkly notes—where do they come from? Will sometimes fields such questions from civilians, as he calls people without his lifelong training and expertise. He has patient, gracious answers. Even so, Martin declines to ask. Not that it matters. The performance tonight is one great flying contraption of fast and faster and though Martin doesn’t speak the language it makes some kind of sense to him. Theme, development, tension, tension. At the moment Martin’s not sure where it’s all going but that’s okay, he’s with it. He trusts. No matter that Martin’s hearing isn’t great—all those childhood ear infections—and he knows little of music, despite Will’s insistence that Martin knows more than he admits. What counts is that Martin rely on Will’s held or loose breath, clenched or relaxed muscles, the practiced ways in which two people really know each other, to tell how things are going and gone. And then the piece ends and the audience applauds solidly if not wildly and the conductor beckons. Will stands on stage and bows. He clasps his hands together and shakes them above his head at the musicians, the audience, Martin, thank you, bravo.
After the performance, Martin and Will sit outdoors at a crowded café and eat traditional chimney cake—an alarming construction and shudderingly sugary but they feast anyway and sip from tiny cordial glasses in honour of culinary history and the mostly successful premiere. Will smudges away a dollop of cream on Martin’s face and any worry he’s felt, the nameless sticky dread he often wakes to in the middle of the night, unglues. Look at them, Martin thinks. Their luck. Hard work rewarded, unlike so many people’s. Tomorrow they will tour Trinity Square and the thirteenth-century Matthias Church. Visit more cafés, drink the thick coffee. After a few days they will return home to the show-stopper house they had built in a leafy Atlanta suburb. Upon slumbering ten hours a night for three nights, with any luck—insomnia on its own vacation for once—Martin will return to his lab at the university, although it is late May and officially summer break. He’ll pack his modest lunches and eat in front of his computer screens. Bliss. Never mind the hard work. He thanks his sheer dumb luck.
He places his fork on the shared plate. He pushes his empty glass away and the waiter by the café door catches Martin’s eye. No thanks, Martin nods. He raises his hands and pushes the air, done.
Not bliss, the sudden gouging splinter in his mind. Or, more precisely, what he thinks of as the mind of his discarded and resentful ghost flesh. The old flesh he sloughed. The overlarge boy-self that sometimes parks on Martin’s chest and refuses to budge.
Fuck you, the kiddo says. Fuck everything.
To whom are you speaking? Martin silently back-talks it, as he’s trained himself to do. At the same time he tries hard to think kind thoughts, to not succumb to the fat-shaming he sometimes heaps on this child Martin used to be.
As if to prove a point, Martin takes up his fork again and allows himself a morsel more.
After the nightmare of racing through the Brussels airport to make their connection, after Will as usual is the brown man pulled aside for a securi
ty interview in a windowless room while Martin frets and curses—followed by the near torture of missing their connection and exhaustedly dozing in the corporate airport hotel room they’d been forced to take, and missing dinner and then rising at four the next morning for their new flight—they arrive home sweet home. When they rise refreshed from their bed, Will pops popcorn in the microwave, Martin pours the Vouvray. They stream some flick, no big deal, and Martin enjoys the undemanding pace. He makes sure that it’s Will who polishes off the few remaining pieces of popcorn. Outside the living-room window, the birch and Japanese maples and dogwood—and the peonies! like giant coral-coloured gods, some of the exquisite, costly landscaping Martin and Will had put in—nose the currents of the night sky. The plantings with their swaying remind Martin of the oceans whose graceful and imperiled inhabitants he’s imagined each of the multiple times he and Will have crossed and re-crossed for getaways and conferences and performances. This place, this home, is their private Eden.
Martin collects the wine glasses and heads for the kitchen. What can I get you? he asks over his shoulder.
Don’t make me say it, Will says.
Martin puts the glasses down too hard on the kitchen counter, breaking the base off one. For the past six months, Will has been after Martin. Will wants a baby. He’s done all this research. Apparently he means it. A baby? A baby? Shit, Martin says. Fuck.
You okay in there?
Martin disposes of the broken stemware and returns to the living room, where Will has opened his laptop. Martin sits in the easy chair opposite the sofa. What are you doing? he asks.
Will clicks and smiles at something on screen. What are you? he says.
Fuck, Martin says.
Will’s attention never wavers from his computer. Excuse me? he says.
Nothing.
Good, Will says, typing quickly. Without looking up he says, Your mother hearts the one with you in front of the Great Synagogue.
Martin wishes Will would check in with Martin’s mother Top Secret and leave Martin out of it. He wishes Will wouldn’t post their travel photos for Martin’s mother to browse. But he feels powerless to stop Will. In the four years since the wedding, Will has acquired certain non-musical super powers with which to charm Martin’s terror of a psych-doc mother, still resident in his natal Chicago. Will’s math-head niece and her latest prize-winning conquests, his older brother making Assistant District Attorney for Delaware, the restaurant downtown Will and Martin recently tried—any such news does the trick. Martin’s mother’s voice ascends to the sprightly caprice Martin hears when Will forcibly hands a helpless Martin the phone. Why, Martin sometimes wonders, can’t he admit to Will that the cost of such wondrous abilities, and their capacity to uneasily bridge the years-long distance between Martin and his mother, is more of the sudden reappearances of the boy-shithead—the sneering, chunky know-it-all Martin used to be, who rematerializes to fossick at Martin’s adult ribs.
Some bridges, Martin thinks, are best blown the fuck up and never rebuilt.
Will glances over from his laptop. Hey, sad sack, he says. Remember Budapest? He pats the couch beside him. Want to see the pics again?
Palms sweating, Martin obeys, seating himself next to Will. I remember nothing, confess nothing, Martin says, smoothing and dampening his pant legs with his now-sweaty palms.
I know, Will says, tapping, clicking. You never do. What’s the story on that?
You have no idea.
Martin does know the story and it’s some premium bullshit. Bullshit the reasons Martin’s mother once upon a time gave for the late-night phone conversations she took in her bedroom, behind her closed door when he was growing up—her claims that she sometimes did Top Secret work for the government, which forbade her to speak about it. Probably bullshit. She worked for the VA, still does, and Martin surmises that on such evenings she’d just been the shrink on call, issuing changes to med dosages for fucked-up veterans, poor bastards unlucky enough to be under her care. Criminals, was how she’d privately, at home to Martin, refer to her patients.
So how’s this for Top Fucking Secret? Martin’s ongoing and profitably supported research. His fancy pants algorithms—souped-up data-in, response-out programs, super-elite editions of the machine learning that enables a robot to sally forth and avoid obstacles on a kitchen floor. A lot more bang for the buck with Martin’s work though. What he does enables a mini-bot to precisely navigate an abandoned apartment block halfway across the world. A ruined bedroom that once slept five. A living room where four generations once gossiped. Scourable ruins of deranged plaster and shredded furniture and maybe coded messages that could disastrously affect the beleaguered, fragile world—Life As We Know It, as Martin decently tries not to think of it.
As such, Martin’s work is truly important. As such, the funding never fucking ends.
A baby? How does a baby fit in all this?
In such a fucking world as this?
Black, white? Martin asks the third night home from Budapest, during dinner, Will on his case again. He gave the subject its own vacation while they were away but now apparently it’s up and at it and moving way too fast. Can’t we slow things down? Martin wants to say. What flavour kid are we talking? Martin says instead.
Banana, Will responds with a shrug.
Why not? That’ll cost years of therapy. Big bucks.
That’s what parents do, dope. It’s what they’re for. You should know.
The grilled chicken expands miserably, betrayingly in Martin’s stomach. His head sponges acids. He can’t believe Will has stooped so low. Who kidnapped Martin’s gentle, kind husband and swapped in an imposter?
A wounded, sour anger—one Martin rarely feels these days and is usually able to quell—coils in his throat. Today’s insight brought to you by WILL, Martin snaps. Let’s hear it for WISE WILLY.
Martin sits back. The bizarre, aggrieved thought of jabbing a finger down his throat and puking onto his plate crosses his mind. DUMB FUCK, he shouts inwardly. Though he’s confused as to whom this thought is addressed.
Will adopts his ironically quizzical expression, which always makes Martin feel foolish beyond words. Hello? Will says. HELLO? Calling MARTIN? I think you want to walk this one back, MARTIN. Way back.
After Will falls asleep that night Martin creeps downstairs and shuts himself in the first-floor bathroom. His mother picks up within seconds. Yes, she says. I’m here. To whom am I speaking?
Hi there, Martin begins.
Where are you? she asks.
He imagines her sitting in bed, wearing an alert expression, and Martin feels a pulse of old anger. Describe the room for me, he remembers her instructing him, trying to talk him down from his swirling anxiety when he’d call during the few trips he took with his father, who’d abandon Martin for hours on end to prowl bars and hang out with local bands in whatever bullshit towns they happened to pass through. Bullshit—one of his dad’s many choice words and now, when he’s agitated, Martin ruefully admits, one of his own top hundred. The trips took place after his parents’ marriage cracked and before a preteen Martin cut off most contact with the guy. Even back then, Martin had the smarts to realize that one parent with issues was more than enough to deal with.
Back then, his mother’s issues—her talents—lay in insinuating herself into Martin’s head. Describe the room for me—so she could put herself in the room, mentally accompany him everywhere, indispensible. Insert herself into his abandonment. Offer herself as the solution, his best company, the two of them in it, in everything, together. A way to bind him to her. Keep him all up in her tangled stratagems. He and his mom—she who believes she knows most everything, able to stare uncontested at things as they are—against the flawed world, as she sees it.
As a young kid, her superiority game made him feel safe. Until it angered and sickened him and he figured out he’d had enough. Of coupledom
with her. Enough of her distancing ways that estranged her, and by extension Martin, from others.
Martin? she says. I said where are you?
He’s not abandoned now, he reminds himself. Not with Will in his life. Martin’s life is solid. Fuck his mother’s worn gambits, he thinks, even as he reaches from his perch on the toilet-seat cover to turn off the bathroom light. He’s safe from her, he is. Besides, where does she think he is? He’s home—home!
You first, he tells her.
Where am I, she says. Good one.
How are you? he says, deciding to skip ahead.
You have no idea, she says coolly.
Same here! Martin resists the urge to crow. After all this time, how hard and crucial it still is to resist her mental trapezes, his own trick-unicycle spokes spinning beneath them. A mad world he miraculously escaped.
Redirect, redirect, he imagines a voice saying in his head. Resistance is not futile.
I have something to tell you, he ventures, sliding the soles of his feet along the slate floor tile. The chill on his skin emboldens him to proceed with his plan—to try Will’s big idea on for size by trying it out on Martin’s mother. See what she can get up to with it. See how Martin himself deals. He’s trying!
But it’s a risk. He recognizes his emotional regression—a mild one, he’s sure. But he feels pushed and prodded and unsettled in ways he hasn’t since adolescence. Not so solid, he has to admit. Shaken by these arguments with Will. Though he and Will always figure shit out. They always do.
Martin’s mother is still on the line.
Big news, he says, hating himself a little.
A muffled swoosh. He imagines her on the mattress, surrounded by the trash she has picked and saved from the parking-lot easement outside her townhouse—the easement for which she has for years tried in vain to buy the rights. He imagines her crumpling and smoothing and re-crumpling the offending plastic bags and candy wrappers discarded by the employees of the neighbouring child disability services who park there. Her twenty-plus-years’ sworn enemies. She’d also managed to alienate herself and Martin from the other townhouse owners in their group, who had no problem with the easement and resented her near-constant plotting, the way she increasingly implied that they were fools for not taking her seriously about such weighty matters. That they’d be sorry one day.