Like Visiting Joseph Cornell

Surrealism’s philosophy relative to, concern with, the “object”—a kind of happy marriage with my life-long preoccupation with things. Especially with regard to the past, a futile reminiscence of the Mill notion that everything old is good & valuable—mystical sense of the past—empathy for antiques—nostalgia for old books.

—Joseph Cornell

He floats, she thought, as she thought about him and she couldn’t help thinking about him, out to flea markets, and returns, not with a small glass bottle, but with giant chests of drawers, bent calipers for measuring skulls, an oversized set of scales, a hodgepodge of stuff, most too large to be placed on a table, and so, like everything piled here and there, in the way of legs and feet. Coming here was, she thought, like bumping into a material version of what she wanted, meeting up with things that she couldn’t have imagined or couldn’t have summoned up the energy to go find, haul into place, pay for, but which once there seemed as familiar as rooms one lay in as a feverish child, the roses on the wallpaper melded in feverish heat. Visiting was like reaching out in the dark to encounter her dead mother on the way to the kitchen to get a glass of water, the hallway between dreaming and waking that as a child she’d taken for granted as another realm in and of itself.

In this one house in Quincy, something of this returned, at least around the edges. There was the pleasure of revisiting the familiar, odd things he’d collected: the 19th-century wooden mantelpiece, the photograph with the smeared emulsion of brooms, the etching of ships coming into harbor. And there was always the pleasure of seeing and touching new objects recently carried in, the anticipation of a future in which there would be more. Her hands opened and shut as if she were being touched instead of touching. It was the house she’d always thought she’d live in and although now she knew she wouldn’t, she wanted to visit it as if it would help some transition not only into a past which she didn’t want to lose sight of, but also into a future that seemed recently more obscure than ever. Lately the constriction in her lungs seemed to be tightening around more than her lungs. She once came close to moving in when for a moment both of them were off balance—he divorced and she alone. She had taken time off work to spend the summer with him and help paint the shutters. But for some reason hidden now in the past and in all that had happened since, she hadn’t.

She said this to the man on the plane. “There must have been more to it,” she confessed as people confess high in the air, but somehow her memory had locked onto one scene. She saw herself sitting in the kitchen with him and his now dead mother, anxious about a plane ride back to the west coast and to whatever was going to happen to her. There didn’t seem to be a discussion at the center of whatever decision had been made, or whatever decision had occurred, since she couldn’t call up a single conversation about it, just those green and pink fringes of anxiety that erupt from a missing center like steamers of confetti falling from the sky.

Her help with the shutters wasn’t all. The move into the house was an excavation into someone else’s past, their own being too familiar, too ill-defined. If the idea of self-examination ever came up, it was set off to the side, cordoned off. In the dreams she had upon arriving, she found herself trespassing, trying to extricate herself from entangling fences, coming upon flat sheets of cardboard that required intricate fitting together, tabs and slits, but she fumbled—all hands—and woke up. In the decaying house they came upon ruins that drew and transfixed them: bits of melted fiberglass like sculpted embryos, cast ceramic coverings for the wiring, one layer of Victorian wallpaper on top of another: yellow roses, then stripes, then a delicate patterning of small bouquets tied with ribbons, layered like kimono robes one on top of the other as they were unevenly stripped away. The whole room unfolded in a paper fan of green wavy stripes, the wallpaper just put on, 1910: music playing, sun slanting through the tall windows, children waiting to be told.

On some days after a rush of work, they simply stood there, caught in a past life that was more their own than the one before them, as if they could fall asleep and awake, posed formally before the photographer who disappeared beneath a black cloth and ordered them to stand still. The faded photograph of a couple hung in the hallway; the woman’s eyes were half closed. In their fatigue, words seemed to take flight, leaving them behind with what felt like hands enlarged and hot from having been slept on too long.

In the dream she had during the second week, he took her to the edge of the sea to a tent. Inside they played volleyball in miniature since the tent was barely large enough for two army cots. She stood on one side of the pushed-together cots and he on the other and they hit the ball back and forth. When she lay down next to him, she felt the hair on his chest like the fur of animals. On the beach were striped umbrellas, children, colored balls and flying Frisbees. This dream, she thought, was somehow an offering of a kind of life they could have or had had as children, but it was very damp and the quarters were so close she felt herself unable to breathe. She remembered her mother telling her that as she had aged her dreams had become unbearably real.

They put on overalls and gloves and face masks and she tied a bandana around her hair to keep out the dust. Their hand tools became extensions of the hands that ached at the end of the day and refused to uncurl easily around a glass of water, a cup of tea, but once in place, latched on, as the cup became a hand, the hand a cup. They had become one entity working on the house, sanding and painting and waiting. She couldn’t recognize him in his wrappings, and he couldn’t recognize her. Or rather, it wasn’t a question of recognition, but of having agreed as they couldn’t agree on anything else, to work on this house, to put off, perhaps, a time that would eventually come. They were side by side during the day and into the evening; they were lifting their arms; they were crouching by the molding; they were looking at paint samples, fanning out blues and green-blues and narrowing themselves into corners. When they turned into one another by accident, it was like running into something overly familiar but out of place.

They stripped away broken plaster to the wooden slats beneath. Dust stuck to her. Her hair seemed made of filaments. Her nails tore. Something was caught between her teeth. She couldn’t find her socks, her feet, where her feet ended in shoes, the shoes on the carpet, the carpet, dusty and moldy on the wooden floor. They ripped up the carpet, rolled it, took it out to the edge of the street. The window in the bedroom was shifted to the left to give a view to the garden; this shift took days and took it out of her as if parts of her own body had had to be shifted as well. She was sometimes so tired that she simply lay down on the floor and felt the wood beneath her hands anchor her in place.

At the end of the day they sat across from one another over takeout at the one clean space, the kitchen table, and stared into space. She didn’t sleep with him, not only because they were both too tired, but also because they found the intense intimacy of the day, working beside one another for hours, and what turned out to be the unrelenting intimacy of silence over the table, as much as they could take. The Victorian ceilings were high and hard to reach. The inside top shelves of the closet had to be cleaned. The books smelled of foxing. She felt for him in her sleep. Her hands groped the air.

In her dream of the third week he put a yellow dog and her large litter of pups in the bed. They scrambled around on her covers, one paw slipping into a crevice, one ear brushing her face. Everything was lumpy and wet and she felt the bed rock on the waves of the ocean beneath her. The pups dissolved into transparent embryos pulsing their blue veins beneath watery skin. They pushed against her, nudging her, kneading her, licking her.

Crates arrived with the heads of Italian angels, old stone jars, elephants holding up platforms, intricately carved wooden eagles, one with a fish in its mouth. A wooden gazebo from Indonesia filled what used to be the garden lawn. All these objects turned the house into something foreign and exotic, as if a house once landlocked had begun to float, as if the center of the house were no longer just inside, but inside out along the periphery—the porches and patios and gazebos in the yard. The afternoon light was slanted and the air was humid. Horseflies and mosquitoes edged around her hairline. The meadow grasses and Queen Anne’s lace invaded the side yard.

It felt like summer, a summer that had disappeared from her vocabulary until now. She took off her overalls and sat in the sun that flickered in the manner of an old film, the faces of the young parents disintegrating in grainy memory. Each segment of the past hour was so etched and shimmering that she felt it would take her years, given the inevitable passage of time, to remember every small detail, the rigging on the painted ship, the warriors and lances in the carpet, the blank marble eyes of angels, the faces in the film. She must, she thought, remember it all. She tilted her face into the bluish haloes of too much sun.

Workmen came and went. She walked about touching the furniture, rubbing shins against the plush of the sofa, the drip of the palm branches, the doorjambs. She took Polaroids of each stage of progress. The odd color of the prints, the muted green wash, seemed to match her sense of the air inside the house that fell on them, and each day they edged closer to retreat from the world outside the walls they worked in, lived in, slept in. The morbidity of the future had, she thought, been finally resolved: it no longer pulsed as before, but had been edged out by the house itself, by its antique trappings, by summers of childhood, and by an agreement that had come into being without their having had to speak of it. There were but two of them. They curled up together suddenly. They slipped glances in between stacks of drawers that fit no bureaus. Their hands met over newspapers that had been left behind and hauled into the kitchen. He read from a scrap of paper, “Sweet hours have perished here; This is a mighty room; Within its precincts hopes have played—Now shadows in the tomb.” Do you remember, she said, we first were together when my mother was dying. We sat on the bed in my old room, waiting.

In the heat of the sun, the air wobbled. Behind her the wallpaper was warm, beating like a heart when she put her hand to it. She reached out to take his hand and licked it as she once remembered doing as a child marking up her room with wet kisses and feeling the toys painted on the slippery wallpaper now imprinted on her tongue.