The Tai Chi teacher has barely changed in seven years. It’s still hard to tell his age—a youngish old man or an old young one—except that over time he’s developed something of a pot belly. He carries it proudly, for beneath its layers, deep in his center, is the tan tien, “field of the elixir,” he says through the interpreter, where the chi gathers, the vital energy enhanced by breath, to flow through the body, strengthening bones, animating flesh. Like many Chinese terms, chi is hard to define: the presence of chi in the body, the teacher tells us, is what makes the difference between life and death.
He does seem to have very resilient bones, as far as I can tell through his jeans and T-shirt (in winter he wears a flannel shirt and on very cold days an old gray down jacket), but his general appearance is not muscular but soft, a compressed softness like a bale of rags which, coming at you unexpectedly, could send you reeling.
He addresses the class in Chinese, giving his instructions through the interpreter. You’d think after years in New York he’d use English, but no. I guess for his purposes he doesn’t need it. He teaches mostly by example and, except for the anecdotes, his instructions tend to be laconic, though I suspect not quite as laconic as the interpreter makes them.
They take less time in English, and as a result I don’t quite trust the translation.
“Continue,” he says after bidding us good afternoon. He never says, “Begin.” Always “Continue.”
“Again,” he says after one round of the form, “and this time paying attention to breathing. Make the breath thin, long, quiet and slow. Start with slow. Sink the weight into the legs. Be heavy. Continue.” All this through the interpreter, of course.
So we start all over again. It’s easy to sink and be heavy since my body, these last few weeks, feels like sand in a sack. We’re in the park at five-thirty—despite my exhaustion I ordered myself out like a drill sergeant—a dozen of us plus the teacher and the interpreter, practicing amidst the trees, near the sunny playground, not too many children at this hour; the swings wobble in the hot breeze while beyond us the river drifts lazily down from the resplendent bridge. Morning and late afternoon we’re here, not all of us each time, for few people can manage to come twice a day or even every day. For a flat fee we come as often or as seldom as we choose—it’s all the same to the Tai Chi teacher. He accepts our money with the air of accepting a gift (“thank you” is one English phrase he feels comfortable with) and apparently keeps no records, though who knows, he may have detailed ledgers at home, wherever his home is. As in a play, the cast changes but the spectacle remains the same. Breathe, sink, feel the feet rooted in the earth, stay balanced, over and over.
I used to watch, enthralled, from the living room window when Ev and I first moved into the apartment overlooking the river: a motley group of all ages, mostly in shorts or jeans but a few in business suits, their jackets and attaché cases on a nearby bench, doing a slow-motion dance in unison, yet not quite a dance. A ritual, a meditation, I didn’t know what. One afternoon I went down to see for myself and followed along as best I could. Every few moments, as we held a posture, the teacher would come around to fix us, adjusting a shoulder or arm or hip, rounding out sharp angles, uncurling tense fingers, the interpreter following along. “The body moves in one piece, head, shoulders and torso in line,” he’d say, or “The foot clings to the pull of gravity like iron to a magnet,” or “Most important of all, relax, no hard force.” It was habit-forming. I even thought I might learn Chinese by exposure and by matching what I heard with the interpreter’s English, but that, alas, didn’t happen. Other things happened. My leg muscles hardened, my feet sank roots deep in the earth. I began to move like a cat, and like a cat could anticipate the movements of others, but out of vanity I resisted letting my stomach droop into a pot belly.
The second time I came, the teacher demonstrated push hands—the martial art aspect of Tai Chi—with an advanced student. Face to face and standing very erect with one leg placed forward, their hands before them at chest level, palms together, they bowed to each other. Then they stepped closer, and deftly shifting their weight from one leg to the other, began to touch at the forearms and elbows, turning slightly now and then. Nothing much seemed to be happening—mostly I felt their intense absorption. Suddenly the student tottered forward; the teacher reached out an arm to break his fall. They did this several times. The student never seemed disconcerted but smiled and began again. The teacher remained impassive.
“Yield,” he said to the student. “Stop relying on strength. Just try to adhere and stay balanced. You will fail many times. It doesn’t matter. You are making an investment. You’re investing in loss.”
“Righto. No complaints whatsoever,” the student said, and everyone laughed as if at some private joke.
They continued, and soon I saw that it was the teacher’s drawing back slightly, yielding to the weight brought to bear on him, which threw the student off balance. When they were finished they faced each other once more with palms touching and bowed.
The teacher turned to the group. “What was the most important posture in what you have just seen?” He nodded at me.
“The bow,” I said.
It was the right answer. After that he always favored me. He gave me a slim book outlining the philosophy behind Tai Chi—a physical expression of Taoism—with diagrams of the postures so I could study the basics. He told me to read the Samurai’s creed at the back of the book. This was puzzling because I couldn’t see what I might have in common with a Samurai warrior, but I read it anyway. “I have no principles; I make adaptability to all things my principle,” it said, among other things.
Now he nods to me, to do push hands with him. I step forward and we bow. I’m quite relaxed since I know from experience that I cannot overcome him; strength and effort are of no avail and are to be shunned in any case. I also trust that he’ll break my fall.
We continue. I stagger and reel a couple of times, but nothing much is happening. “What’s the matter today?” he asks through the interpreter. “Very little chi.”
“I have no energy. I’m feeling very tired.” As if I have a perpetual flu, but I don’t trouble the interpreter with that. He translates into Chinese, and I have to trust that he’s repeated my words, or some facsimile of my thought.
“Relaxed is good, but not limp. Like a cat, alert, vital, in a state of readiness. Don’t resist but try to sense my energy and stick to it. Continue.”
I try harder. I even try pushing him though I know it’s futile. Wherever I apply my weight, he is suddenly not there. It’s like grappling with a shadow. I press, and his substance vanishes, he’s elusive, he’s elsewhere. I keep stumbling through the space he’s vanished from and he catches me before I fall. He regards me with disapproval.
“I’m investing in loss,” I attempt to joke.
“You’re investing in nothing,” he says, and we bow.
At the end he makes a little speech. “My fellow students, the chi of the ancient Tai Chi masters was so powerful that they could repel an attacker with a look alone. They didn’t even need to use their bodies. The energy was all concentrated in the glance.” He glances my way and indeed I find myself stepping back slightly, at which he smiles. The interpreter never smiles.
The class is over and breaks into small chatty groups. I sit down on a bench next to a new woman, Grace, who’s come only once or twice before. She’s rubbing her calf muscles. I know how she feels; it’s quite hard on the legs at first. It never really eases but you get used to it. A student once asked when his legs would stop hurting. “Never,” said the teacher. “If your legs stop hurting, then it’s not Tai Chi.”
“It’s all a matter of discipline, isn’t it?” she says. “I thought it would be easy because I’m used to that kind of discipline in what I do, but this is different.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a performance artist.” She’s slightly older than I, mid-fortyish, a holdover from the late sixties, dressed all in black, with short dark hair nicely streaked with gray. Soho, I bet. Gay, I bet, from something carefree and staunch in the way she moves and speaks.
“Oh, my stepdaughter is very involved in performance art at school,” I tell her. “She’s always describing the bizarre projects her group does. Do you do theatrical pieces?”
“Not exactly. What I do is more a cross between theatre and visual arts. But really the best thing is to erase the line between the two. Erase all the lines. Forget the idea of a product, a beautiful object. Lots of times we don’t come up with any products. We might just take a piece of ordinary life out of context and exaggerate it.” She pulls off her sneakers and curls her legs under her on the bench. “For instance, someone I know lived in a cage without speaking to anyone for a year. He also lived outdoors for a year. He’s into tests of psychological endurance but he’s also doing social commentary. Like about homeless people, you know?”
“Living outdoors by choice is different from being homeless, though, don’t you think?”
“Sure. That’s what makes it art. It’s a metaphor for a real condition, not the thing itself. It calls attention to the condition. By the way,” and she lowers her voice, “doesn’t this guy speak any English at all?”
“It doesn’t seem so. Except thank you and good-bye.”
She looks dubious. “I bet he understands what we say. He looks very tricky. I’ve heard some of these Taoist guys do magic. Has he shown you any magic?”
I shake my head, no.
“I don’t know,” Grace goes on. “I heard this was great but frankly I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about, all these people paired off and sticking to each other like he says, pushing each other around and feeling each other’s energy.”
“Don’t worry about it. It takes months even to begin to do what he’s asking.”
“You know what the pairs remind me of? The couple-tied-together piece. That was a while ago. The guy who lived outdoors had himself tied to another artist. For a whole year they had an eight-foot rope looped around their waists, with about four feet of slack between them. The woman was into Zen. She was a nun for a while, too.”
“Was that performance art, being a nun?”
“I think so. But I’m sure she was a sincere nun. That’s the whole idea.”
“Odd,” I comment, “that a nun would have herself tied to a man for a year.”
“Oh, she wasn’t a nun anymore, at the time. Besides, it wasn’t the way you’re thinking. Just the opposite—the discipline part was that they weren’t allowed to touch for the whole year. They had to do everything together, cook, shop, walk the dog, go to the movies, you name it, without touching. They kept a chart of the times they accidentally touched. They had everything in the apartment arranged so they could manage. The desks were near the kitchen so one could cook while the other worked. He did more of the cooking. He was very good at Chinese dishes.”
“What was the point?”
“The point?” Grace stares at me in surprise. “It’s about awareness. Training the mind. You begin to notice all the daily little things—where the borders are between people, and where they can connect or merge. Plus the dynamics of gender in domestic life. They did it for so long that it became their real life. Of course, there were a lot of places they couldn’t go, and they decided not to sleep with other people—more trouble than it was worth, I suppose. Personally”—Grace sighs—“I think the greatest danger would be getting bored to death with each other.”
“Not necessarily. Not if they weren’t bored with each other to begin with. I can imagine a couple of people I could be tied to and never get bored,” I say.
You are the only person, Q. told me so many times, who never bores me. You never know, I said. Someday I might. No, he said, never. And what would happen if I bored you? I asked. It’s academic, he said. It could never happen.
“The couple tied together,” says Grace, “didn’t complain about being bored, but they did say they dreamed a lot.”
“Did they dream of being alone or of touching?”
“I don’t know. That’s a good question.”
The teacher, who’s been chatting with a few students, passes by. “Good-bye,” he says in English, and the interpreter adds, perhaps on his own, “He hopes you feel better next time, Laura. Eat watercress.”
“Watercress? Okay. Thanks a lot. See you soon.”
“I don’t see how you could ever defend yourself on the subway with Tai Chi,” says Grace as we trudge up the hill, away from the river. “Always yielding? How would it work with a mugger? Do you think you could do it?”
“Probably not. But I’m not in it for self-defense. The teacher says it’s the one martial art you have to know very well in order to use. Otherwise it’s a risk.”
“I’ll bet. Some performance artists are into risk. They design dangerous projects to make a point. There was a show downtown where a man covered the floor with broken glass and slithered through it on his belly with his hands tied behind his back.”
“Did he have clothes on?”
She gives a throaty laugh. “Yes, I’m pretty sure. You have to realize, the whole thing is a metaphor.”
“I get it, yes.” I can imagine other projects performance artists might try as metaphors: surgery, or at least a prolonged hospital stay. Divorce. Getting fired. It’s a fertile field for anyone with imagination. Everything, seen in the proper light, can become a metaphor. The trick is finding, or being found by, the right ones.
I dropped my keys on the way in. That’s the latest symptom: things leap from my hands. Mostly small slippery things, bottle caps, paper clips, the pen, as I write this, but often larger things as well—magazines or socks or fruits I’m squeezing at the open-air market. Thoughts, too, slide from my grasp, but that’s another story.
The very next morning, it was a commonplace glass from Woolworth’s. I had groped my way from bed to the kitchen, cursing the car alarm just below my window, and was about to pour some juice when the glass wantonly escaped, to plummet three feet through the air. The instant it took to reach the floor was time enough, even in my stupor, for me to envision the results. The thud and smash, shattering me awake. I’d reach for the dustpan and brush above the sink and sweep up the chips around my slippered feet. Shuffle into the pantry for the electric broom—I could hear its ominous rumble waiting to be summoned into existence—and let it suck up the shards that elude the brush. Even so, I’d keep from walking around barefoot for a while, to be quite sure. I thought of the man Grace mentioned, who slithered on his belly through broken glass. For art’s sake. Obviously I wasn’t daring enough for the avant-garde.
I’d have to warn the others in the house not to walk barefoot... wait, there were no others in the house. Ev, my husband, was dead and had been so for more than two years, though when half-awake I tend to forget this, then promptly remember not so much with grief any longer as with astonishment. His children, my stepchildren, Jilly and Tony, don’t visit very often (Tony almost never, to tell the truth), and when they do they naturally wear shoes.
Days from now I’d be seeing slivers glinting from corners, sharp reminders that if not for the fortuitous slant of light, a misstep might have sent them journeying through my bloodstream to pierce a vital organ. Heart, lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys are the vital organs in Chinese medicine, the Tai Chi teacher says, each corresponding to one of the primal elements—fire, metal, wood, earth, and water, respectively, which came into being out of nothingness through the coupling of yin and yang—and to a primal emotion: joy, sadness, anger, will, fear. I could ill afford that sort of damage.
All this I foresaw as the glass plummeted to the tile floor where, happily, it didn’t break (cheap and sturdy) but bounced twice, rolled a few feet—the floor in this old apartment building is slightly sloping—and halted at the edge of the refrigerator. At that instant the car alarm abruptly ceased.
A good omen. I’ve been worried lately about the things dropping, the supernatural exhaustion, the hypersensitivity to noise, not to mention the more mundane signs—sore throats, headaches, stomach cramps. . . . Oh, and not minding the heat. Everyone complains that the weather is tropical, unbearable, but I haven’t noticed except in a mental way—I hear bulletins on the radio, I check the thermometer. It’s because I myself am so hot. Not my skin, especially, but inside. No sudden waves of heat such as my former editor, Gretchen, a case of early menopause, would describe when she phoned to prod me about my books, but a steady heat steaming out from the center with each thump of my heart, clouding me with mist. Feverish people say they’re on fire, but I feel like the cauldron itself, containing a stew—those vital organs—that simmers dully along. Or like a bag of sand left out in the sun. Between the outside weather and the inner is no disparity; the weather is merely my projection. They say illness makes you solipsistic, the world a mere projection or translation. If this is illness. It could be any number of things. I’m not eager to find out.
Pathetic, to take so unremarkable an incident as a good omen. Superstition is a symptom, too.
Friends who’ve noticed my symptoms tell me to go to a doctor but I’m reluctant. Not only for the obvious reason, that he or she—but it seems usually to be he, doesn’t it?—might find something really wrong. My previous visits have been a powerful deterrent. “Our private conversations,” as Joel Cairo says in The Maltese Falcon, which I saw last month with Tim, “have not been such that I am anxious to continue them.”
Nine or ten years ago, I must have been thirty-one or so, I consulted a doctor, let’s call him Dr A., about some white specks on my tongue. They were disturbing out of all proportion to their size, the tongue being the organ by which we taste and speak, take pleasure and shape language. Moreover, the mouth is the gateway for the breath, which is palpable spirit and is also the place where we live, notwithstanding Freud. A few small specks on the tongue can be as uncomfortable as a grape-sized lump on the hand, with which we write and grope our way through the world, or on the foot, which gives blessed mobility.
“Stick out your tongue,” said Dr. A., and I became a child again.
He was very tall and straight, with a military bearing, so although I was in the higher seat, a large leather chair, and he on a small stool, we were face to face. Quite close, our knees nearly touching. He was older than I, with a pink Buddha-like face, a huge bald dome of a head with a fringe of dark hair, and serene gray eyes that seemed too static, trancelike, as he studied my tongue.
“I’m afraid I must ask you a very odd and perhaps embarrassing question,” he said, and paused to allow me time to retract my tongue and prepare myself. “It is this. Have you sucked any strange penises lately?”
I was unprepared. I had to control the urge to giggle into the looming pink face. They’re all strange to us girls, was the response that sprang to mind, but that would never do.
“No,” I said truthfully.
Not even my husband’s, I might have added, which would have been the least strange in the sense of the word I took him to mean—unfamiliar, illicit—since he’s away covering the conflict in Nicaragua. And Q., short for Quinn, the only other man I occasionally sleep with, Doctor A., since you ask (though one doesn’t do that specific act every time, speaking for myself at any rate—it’s hard to say in general and I for one never trust the answers people give on those sex surveys), is in Minneapolis doing a season of repertory with the Guthrie: All My Sons, I believe, and God, I don’t envy him that; Creon in Antigone; something by Moliére, I forget which; and something very current. Besides, flustered as I am at the moment, Doctor A., I can’t even recall whether Q. and I are in a lovers’ phase or a just-friends phase—it changes so erratically. Immaterial anyway. Come to think of it, I just spoke to my husband, Ev, on the phone two nights ago. It’s hard for him to make personal phone calls so I was pleased that he made the effort and succeeded, and although after telling me a little bit about the situation in Managua—very little, you understand, the phones are bugged—he did say something mildly erotic on the order of how he wished he could hold me in his arms that night, while I on my end was thinking more or less the same thing, nothing as localized as sucking penises was mentioned. I didn’t even entertain the notion, in case the power of suggestion has anything to do with my ailment, nor, I would imagine, did Ev, who was preoccupied with the political ferment around him, the kind of volatile situation I presume could take a man’s mind off his penis for a while, though I couldn’t swear to it. Anyhow, that was two days ago and the specks on my tongue had already erupted.
Naturally I didn’t say all this. I know how to behave in a doctor’s office.
“Well.” Dr. A. pushed back from me on his wheeled stool. “I would say it’s probably nothing to worry about. Chances are they’ll disappear as mysteriously as they came.” He stood up and turned to his desk with a slight air, I think, of disappointment.
Oh, dear, had he been hoping for a good story? Did I let him down? So sorry, try me another day, I might have said.
In a few days the specks did go away as mysteriously as they had come and I regretted visiting Dr. A., whose odd question would now have a permanent and unwelcome place in my memory, the data bank, as my friend Mona calls it with disapproval. The visit confirmed my instinct not to consult doctors but rather to wait.
Years later, just after Ev was killed, I developed a bad sore throat. I waited and waited but it didn’t go away. It got worse. People—my on-and-off lover Q., my stepdaughter Jilly, my cousin Joyce—urged me to see a doctor. It might be strep, it might lead to something worse. I was a brand-new widow and everyone wanted to take care of me. Oh, all right, I agreed. But Dr. A.? After that odd question? For two days, while my throat worsened, I debated whether to return and risk being asked other odd questions (yet how much odder could they be?) or go elsewhere, flying to evils that I knew not of. In the end I decided on Dr. A., unwisely, you may think, but when feeling sick one isn’t wise. He couldn’t possibly remember my tongue, I reasoned. He probably wouldn’t even remember me after eight years—so many patients, so many tongues, who knows how many odd questions. And this was a plain sore throat; innocent children get sore throats all the time.
Of course he remembered me, said Dr. A. genially, and as he sat on his wheeled stool and examined my throat he asked how I had been in the intervening years, to which I could reply only with a gagging noise. No way to tell him my husband had been shot to death in the interim. No inclination either. Dr. A. had the same entranced gray eyes and Buddha-like expression, though unlike Buddha he had visibly aged; his skin was not so pink and babyish any more. As he retrieved some fluid from my throat on a cotton swab, I felt pleased with myself. I would find relief, come away with a prescription like a sensible person. I had not been daunted by a question perhaps posed in the line of duty, however gracelessly.
He walked across the room to put the fluid on a slide. With his back to me he said, “I not only remember you but I remember that the last time you were here I had occasion to ask you a very odd and possibly embarrassing question. Do you remember?”
I might have added that today his odd question would be even less pertinent, since Ev had died two months earlier, killed on a Bronx street in a drug bust. A bystander, more or less. And Q.? Well, yes, Q. had turned up a few weeks later. He walked in with a suitcase and a bag of groceries, all the foods he knew I liked, and stayed for a month. He warmed the bed, but the love we made for that month was of the consoling kind. Q. managed everything, solicitous, treating me like a bereft child; no question of much on my part. I was passive until the last moments when I would erupt in tears as well as pleasure. Q. was magnanimous as only he can be, especially when nothing much is expected of him. Despite the irritation at my marriage he had shown on and off over the years, he was in no hurry to appropriate me now that I was “free,” the way, when a New York City parking space becomes free, the next occupant is already waiting, motor humming, to slide in before it cools off. Long ago, when I was in love with Q. in a less ambiguous way, I had had fantasies that if Ev were to disappear (God knows I never envisioned him shot, I just thought he would tire of me), Q. would rush to my side as the Prince rushed to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or countless others, sweep me up on his horse and carry me off, even though I was neither sleeping nor held captive. But this didn’t happen, and after a while I stopped imagining or wishing it. I tried to live my divided life.
In any event, my tongue was fine today and my sore throat, however painful, felt ordinary—unless it was punitive, my own retaliation for sleeping with Q. so soon after my husband’s violent death. But I hadn’t suffered much guilt while he was alive, so it didn’t follow. . . . Well, never mind all that. An antibiotic would do the trick.
I didn’t say any of the above to Dr. A. Indeed, I spoke not another word, quite as if my once-offending tongue had been cut out. I listened to his instructions about the antibiotic, accepted the prescription from his cool, dry hand, and left. In a week I was better. I resolved never to return to Dr. A. and perhaps not to any doctor ever again.
WHY NOT GO BACK TO BED FOR A WHILE, I thought after I drank the juice from the sturdy glass. I see the bed as my true home, my home within a home. Whoever invented it deserves as much renown as the inventor of the cotton gin or the steam engine, those inventions taught in school. People have always stretched out spontaneously on anything handy, yes, but I mean the combination of elements forming the bed itself. The raised platform, which makes climbing in a decisive event. The mattress and box spring, inspired notions lovingly wrought. The feather pillow and the quilt are to repose what champagne and chocolate mousse are to diet. Amazing, really, that such luxurious sensuality is available to all strata of society, except of course the homeless who swarm the local streets and sleep God knows where, niches, doorways and sections of Riverside Park they’ve appropriated as campsites. Even so, many of them drag around shopping carts stuffed with puffy bedding.
My bed, a modest double, nothing kingly or queenly, has become more than a haven or refuge. It’s a lover. At my most exhausted moments I sense it reaching toward me like the vibrations of the universe, for the Tai Chi teacher says the universe is a great system of vibrations we draw to us by our feelings: fear draws fear, love draws love. I almost hear the bed whispering to me to come, the way you might feel a lover longing for you miles away, and I come readily, falling onto the waiting mattress, firm but yielding as an accomplished lover, the strong coils beneath the stuffing like reliable bones beneath the flesh. I lie down as eagerly as did the princess worn out from her wanderings, except under this mattress is no irritating pea. No, the bed is a perfect and perfectly welcoming lover. The pillow sinks benignly under the weight of my head and rises mildly around my hair. I pull the sheet over me to be utterly surrounded, voluptuously embraced. It folds coolly around my legs as a lover’s skin may be cool at first touch, but it quickly warms up from my body’s heat, creating a tube of warmth. As the bed presses gently along the length of me, I let go. Every cell yields to the embrace which of late I find satisfying like no other. Totally understanding, the bed accepts that I have nothing to offer but warmth, which I have in abundance. I need not respond or embrace in return. The bed seeks nothing for itself—its pleasure is to wrap me in pleasure.
I WAS ROUSED by the sound of the door opening. Tim. Since I gave him a set of keys last month, I’ve had to get used to that sequence of sounds all over again, the key slipping into the shaft, metal grating against metal, the door thrusting past the wooden frame. His arrival and the light filtering through the drawn shades told me it was early evening. Slept the day away. Just as well—things pick up for me around twilight. My blood stirs and moves a bit faster. I hauled myself up to greet him.
Standing in the hall, tired and apparently dazed by the heat, his tan suit jacket slung over his shoulder in the manner of middle-aged professionals in summer, Tim held beside him, like a cane or a crutch, a five-foot-high narrow gray object, curved at both ends, with two holes cut out as if for eyes.
“What is that?”
“What does it look like, Laura?”
“It looks like the bumper of a car.”
“It is the bumper of a car. Your car.”
“What is it doing here?”
“I guess you haven’t seen your car lately. I passed it as I was coming up the street, and this had fallen off.”
“How?”
“Oh, probably during the daily stampede to park by two o’clock, someone backed into you, and your car being the piece of junk it is, this fell off.”
I ignored the insult to my car, which I’m fond of, a little white Geo which Tim says resembles, in looks and performance, a golf cart. “When I moved it around one-thirty there was someone in front of me with a few feet to spare. I wonder how this happened. Luke would have let me know if he’d seen anything.”
The super of the building next door, with whom I’ve had an amiable flirtation for some time, is our block’s de facto mayor, of the Fiorello La Guardia type. Luke knows everyone, keeps close track of local developments, sizes up newcomers and acts as public relations and peacekeeping officer. He alerts us to cops or meter maids in their drab brown uniforms—a cut below the blue—writing out parking tickets, and will even ring doorbells to shout a warning through the intercom, at which we race down and drive around the block until the menace has passed.
“There’s no one in front of you now. But someone must have done this.”
“Well, put it down, for God’s sake. It must be heavy.”
“Where do you want it, ma’am?”
“Anywhere. Leave it over there against the wall. Wait, let me help you drag it.”
Tim shook his head and raised the bumper high in the air with the slow, triumphant gesture of a weight lifter.
“What are you doing? It’s a bumper. Put it down.”
“Here, you try.”
I was expecting to lift a heavy weight, so I almost dropped it. “My God. Isn’t it metal?”
“Plastic. On some cars it’s metal, but not on yours.”
“So what do you think this weighs?” I leaned it against the wall.
“Maybe four pounds.”
“Four pounds?”
“Yes, it’s shocking, isn’t it? When you think that this is what stands between you and an oncoming car. Well, I’ll put it back on in the morning.”
“Is that all? You mean I don’t have to take it to the garage?”
“I doubt it. It’s probably some kind of hook-and-eye affair. I just didn’t want to bother right now. So how about a reward? Give us a kiss.”
I went closer. “Thanks, Tim. I dub you Sir Tim for that deed. It looks sort of nice against the wall, doesn’t it? Like sculpture.”
He let his jacket slip to the floor and put his arms around me, checking here and there as if to make sure the vital parts were still in place. Maybe finding the bumper detached had unnerved him. “Any chance of getting a cold drink?” he murmured in my ear.
Besides rescuing my bumper, he had rented a movie we could watch along with the Chinese food I would procure by telephone. The sort of evening that could not have taken place in the pre-electronic age but now took place virtually everywhere, even in the little seaside hamlet that was the setting of the novel I was trying, in my few waking hours, to write. The movie in Tim’s briefcase was Anthony Adverse, which he assured me I would enjoy since it was based on a book and contained everything important: love, war, travel, betrayal and loss, music, suffering, and scenery.
After we studied the Chinese menu, Tim went off to take a shower and I made the call. Our local restaurant operates with the efficiency of the FBI. I needed only to recite my telephone number, and all my required data popped up on their computer screen, including my previous purchasing record. Tim is the sort of man who doesn’t find this unsettling.
While he is in the shower, a word or two about Tim might be in order. Not that his excellent qualities don’t deserve lengthier consideration—I appreciate him and show it, believe me—but I have a feeling he may not be a crucial character in this particular story, however it proceeds. I’ll be patching bits and pieces as I go. Even in real life, I sometimes feel I’m making Tim up. He is so useful for the moment and appeared so opportunely in my solitude.
Tim is a lawyer. An attorney, I guess he’d prefer to be called. He draws up contracts between parties—people or corporate entities. He presides over their arduous creation and frequently over their arduous destruction. He is familiar with the byways and crannies of accommodation, which makes him a good companion. That’s all I know about that part of his life. He doesn’t like to talk about his work, unfortunately, since I love hearing people talk about their work: I store it all in the data bank. Ev was invaluable that way, with sagas of crime, war, and derring-do he picked up as a reporter. He tended to dwell too long on political systems and physical settings, but I was willing to wait for the intrigue, the moral turpitude and outrageous behavior I liked. That source, alas, has dried up.
Tim is one of those people who divide life into work and recreation, and I fall into his recreation category, especially as he doesn’t associate me with children or family obligations, which he has elsewhere. He’s divorced, gradually growing less bitter about it. So far I’ve been willing to be his recreation. What he offers me in return, aside from companionship and the usual male handyman skills, is an entrée into ordinary middle-class life, where I can carry on my researches. Tim is my analogue of Ev’s press card. Since Ev died I’ve become reclusive, living on the margins. Through Tim I get to spend an occasional weekend out of town, to attend parties and go on excursions I wouldn’t seek on my own.
In the gatherings Tim has taken me to, sooner or later, after discussing the number of miles they log each morning to outrace mortality, or the relative merits and demerits of butter and margarine, people get around to “serious issues”—the destruction of the rain forests and the depletion of the ozone layer, the aimlessness of the younger generation illustrated by examples from their own children, the scourge of illiteracy, and, inevitably, why is it that some ethnic groups, e.g., Koreans and Jews, have been able to lift themselves out of poverty onto the plateau of the middle class while other ethnic groups, e.g., blacks, have not?
Four possible approaches are taken to the issues, and they generally appear in fugue-like form: Bemoaning is the opening theme, followed by Blaming the parties involved; next comes Defending the parties involved by examining the problem in its social context—a kind of counterpoint melody—and finally, some form of Temporizing, usually offered by a peaceable person thus far silent. The four themes can go on indefinitely until they’re resolved in the harmony of grateful good-nights. I’ve often thought that on arrival the guests might choose placards representing their positions—for in the nature of things these positions are fixed in advance.
For the dozen years I shared Ev’s bed, I, too, was diligently concerned and well informed. Ev knew the etiologies and interrelations of all the issues and their positions in the issue hierarchy as well as the range of possible opinions, and where did all his knowledge lead? The data of that conscientious brain spilled on a Bronx street in a shootout. Ever since, I can’t seem to concern myself with issues. It’s not a political reaction. The issues remind me of him and of all the things he didn’t talk about, also spilled and lost. The hollow tunnel of our life together that I’m trying, now, to fill belatedly with words.
Anyway, Tim is more fun alone, and as I listened to the pleasant brooky music of the shower, I found myself thinking, This is not so bad. Not bad at all. So what if Ev is dead? And Jilly miles away and Tony doesn’t like me. So what if Q. . . . No, leave us not even think of Q. at a moment of relative contentment. So what if something is wrong with me, so wrong that I’m too tired to write a sentence of the modem-day fable I’m struggling with, set in an idyllic town washed by the sea and lulled by the rhythms of the tides, a salty-aired benevolent town where, aside from the explosive vagaries of nature—gales and storms—nothing ever goes much awry, a keen contrast to my city, guarded by rivers and shaken by car alarms and shrieking sirens. And if I don’t write a few sentences pretty soon I’ll run out of money. I have this clever, well-built man splashing around in my shower in that energetic way they have. Later in my bed. I don’t love him except in the mildest way and chances are he doesn’t love me no matter what he professes in bed. So what? We behave well to each other. Surely that counts for something? He rescues my car, he brings a good movie. Soon we’ll be eating steamed dumplings in garlic sauce, shrimp in black bean sauce, sesame chicken, and the little extras like toasted pecans and oranges they throw in to beat the competition. No complaints whatsoever.
I set up a couple of stacking tables in the living room so we could enjoy our feast while watching Anthony Adverse, featuring the young Fredric March.
“All set?” asked Tim, his finger aimed at the Play button. His graying blond hair was smoothed down, and he was less formal in shorts and a striped T-shirt.
“No, wait a minute. Something’s wrong here.” I was undoing the cardboard cartons, putting aside the fortune cookies and teabags. Some packets of soy sauce and mustard slipped from my grasp. “Shit, I drop everything lately. Maybe I have a brain tumor.”
“Nonsense. What are you fussing with?”
“Come and look. This isn’t shrimp in black bean sauce, is it?”
“No, it looks like lamb or beef.”
“And this. It isn’t sesame chicken.”
“It could be.” He smelled it.
“No, I know what their sesame chicken looks like. Little nuggets. This is sesame something else. Let’s see what that other one is. We can certainly tell if it’s dumplings.”
“It’s sesame noodles,” said Tim.
“That’s a bonus. Open this. Maybe it’s the dumplings.”
“Spare ribs.”
“Oh, for Chrissakes. They sent the wrong order. I knew this would happen one day. It’s because they’ve got everything on the damn computer.”
“Why don’t we eat it anyway? It looks fine. And it all tastes more or less the same.”
“But it’s not what we wanted. Someone else is having what we wanted.”
Tim faced me wearily. “Would you like me to call and have them straighten it out?”
“Oh .. . no. I guess it doesn’t pay. You’re very hungry, aren’t you?”
“I could wait, if it’s important to you.”
“Never mind. You’re right, let’s eat it. That’s the secret of life, isn’t it? To like what you get.”
“I don’t know about life in general, but this looks okay to me. Come on, Laura, don’t take it so hard.” He filled his plate eagerly. “And now for the show.”
“Tim, you’d make a great Buddhist. You remind me of a story my Tai Chi teacher tells. It’s become sort of a joke in the class.”
“So, am I going to have to beg you?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d be interested. Okay. Long ago there was this Japanese woman who was known far and wide for her wisdom and integrity. Another Buddhist—this one was not so calm—traveled for days to consult her and when he arrived he said, ‘What can I do to put my heart at rest?’ She told him, ‘Every morning and every evening, and whenever anything happens to you, say, “Thanks for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.”’ Well, the man went home and did that for a year, but his heart was still agitated. So he went back, very dejected. ‘I did exactly what you said,’ he reported, ‘but nothing has changed. I’m just as discontented as ever. What should I do?’ She said, ‘Thanks for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.’ And then, naturally, he was transformed by her wisdom and lived happily ever after.”
Tim chuckled. “Very good. I’m in total agreement. No complaints whatsoever, at least about the food.”
Ten minutes later he nudged me with his foot. “It’s good, isn’t it? Admit it, it is good.”
“The movie or the food?”
“The food. You’re eating it, I see.”
“It’s tasting bitter,” I muttered.
“What do you mean? What’s bitter?”
“Nothing. You’re right. It’s good. But it still isn’t what we wanted.”
The movie was superb, offering all Tim had promised plus opera, Napoleon, the evils of the slave trade, and many stars in their youth. Afterward we cleaned up the remains of the wrong Chinese dinner and went to bed and made love. “I love you, I love you,” Tim whispered. That was quite nice. It always adds something to hear it, even if I was fairly sure he was only temporarily deluded. Or else saying it out of courtesy, a sense that it was necessary or expected. I didn’t expect it. Q. rarely said it at those moments but rather when we were up and about. In bed he said other things.
I felt a bit ungracious. “I love you, too,” I whispered back. When in Rome. . . . Don’t get me wrong. It was fine making love with Tim. Just fine. Not bad at all.
We lay in each other’s arms for a while. Outside, a whirring motorcycle tore through the night. “Did you happen to bring the paper with you?” I asked. “I thought I might read for a while.”
“It’s in my briefcase. Aren’t you sleepy?”
“I slept on and off all day.”
“Did you call the doctor yet? Well, what are you waiting for? It’s not like you to sleep so much. When was the last time you saw a doctor?”
I shrugged. No point bringing up Dr. A.
“You should get some blood tests and find out what’s going on.” He shifted around. “Come on, put your head here. I’ll hold you and you’ll fall asleep and in the morning you’ll call a doctor.”
Other times he had lulled me to sleep. Tim was good that way. Not tonight, though. “I want to read the New York Times,” I said sulkily.
Ev and I often read the paper after we made love. Companionably—neither of us felt rejected. The dire events of the day were more palatable in a sexual afterglow. Sometimes after the page-turning and exchanging of sections we made love again.
Tim seemed to be asleep. I got the paper out of his briefcase and took it into the dark living room, where I stood at the window gazing at the park and the river. At first they were indistinguishable masses of shadow, but soon I could make out billowy treetops and ripples in the water beyond, and above that the Palisades, and above that the night sky punctured with stars. I enjoyed the rare stillness and the night landscape taking shape as my vision cleared, and I would like to say that a feeling of peace descended and penetrated me, but it didn’t. Peace didn’t enter me but drew me. I wanted to drift through the screened window, rise and be part of the night, just another puff of darkness dispersing. I even stood on tiptoe, as if waiting to be lifted off my feet. I wondered if this was what Jilly had felt last year when she burrowed into my chest—as she used to do long ago, frightened of monster shadows on the wall—and moaned that if Jeff, her boyfriend, died after his motorcycle accident, she would like to die, too. I doubt it. It didn’t seem something a girl of eighteen could feel. I had had enough, that was all. I wanted an assumption. When Ev died I hadn’t wanted to die. I was stunned and listened mutely to what people around me said. The gist of it was, Don’t be afraid, you’re strong, you’ll manage. After a while I began repeating to myself, You’re strong, you’ll manage. I think now that true or not, it was the wrong message. I don’t know what the right message would have been, only that that was wrong.
Suddenly I heard scraping, scratching noises from the south wall, where a streetlight cast a lurid glow on the glass of the French door. Ev used to keep plants on the narrow ledge outside, but they had died shortly after he did. Now the ledge was strewn with leaves, for in summer the building was draped in ivy, and in the leaves a squirrel rustled. I could barely make it out, but the glass reflected the hunched shape and the tiny, distinct hairs of its tail. The hairs shimmered in the light with the stirring of the air. The squirrel’s reflection in the door was clearer than the squirrel itself, as if reality were a subsidiary order of things, whose use was to provide the stuff of images.
Squirrels often darted across the ledge with a sense of purpose and destination, perhaps the park across the street or all the way to the river beyond. If they lingered, I had only to tap on the window or the screen and they would skitter off—I don’t want them to start feeling at home on my ledge. This time when I tapped, the squirrel looked about bemused, like an old scholar at his desk perturbed at the interruption. Then it walked logily back and forth across the ledge. I thought of those indecisive suicides in movies, tottering while eager spectators gather below. The squirrel was bald in places, its fur patchy and matted. Only the tail was full and plump, like a plume richly feathered in every shade of gray. I had to tap several times before it slunk off.
I sat in the armchair facing the river, with the newspaper on my lap, remembering another rodent skittering across the window ledge, the west ledge, seven years ago. It was spring, soon after we’d moved into this apartment high above the water. I was on the phone with Q. I hadn’t spoken to him in months; he’d been away on tour. His voice—Laura, my love—spread through me like honey. Warm, viscous. I took the phone to this same chair and curled up. I wanted to feel through every sense: to bask in the voice and be embraced by the soft chair and fill my eyes with the trees, newly green and spread like lace over the gray, gleaming river. Ev was at his desk in the study; when he worked I didn’t exist for him, but that didn’t matter now. He, too, had ceased to exist. There was only Q.’s voice, this time from California. I leaned back and gave myself up to its spell.
I’ve been thinking of you, came the voice. I miss you. All the time I was away, I thought of you.
He told me stories of his travels. He had been to China, to Japan, to Hong Kong. They were doing Antony and Cleopatra.
The Chinese stared at us on the street, he said. They kept wanting to take pictures of us. Do you know the two things I longed for most? A glass of orange juice in the morning and the sight of a woman in a short skirt. They do Tai Chi in the parks in the morning, Laura, just like you. You would like that. You could join in. Whenever I saw them waving their arms and legs in that serene and powerful way I thought of you. What did you once tell me it was supposed to feel like? That nice image?
Like pulling silk from a cocoon, I said. One smooth unbroken motion all the way through. If you pull too hard, the teacher says, the strand breaks. You lose the rhythm and the flow of energy breaks.
Yes, yes, I like that, said Q. That’s how they all looked. Proprio così. Like they were pulling silk from a cocoon.
As he went on and I basked, a rat ran across the window ledge and burrowed in a comer. Not a squirrel; its tail was long and thin, not rich and bushy. I hated it because it distracted me from my pleasure in Q.’s voice.
I went to Tokyo, the voice murmured. I took a bath with hot coals heating up the water. There were piles of fresh towels and a robe waiting for me. I ate in a noodle shop. I watched them cut up the sushi. They are amazingly quick with the blade. Flick, flick, flick.
Normally I would have been horrified at the rat. I would have dashed over to bang on the window and shoo it away, but now I tried not to pay attention. Besides, Q. had called me serene and powerful, more or less. Go away, rat, let me enjoy this.
I went to a Zen temple and tried to meditate, he said, but I can’t meditate. I just watch the others. I can look like I’m meditating but I’m really not. I wonder if the Zen masters can tell. What am I saying? Of course they can tell. That’s why they’re masters.
Make that rat go away, I prayed silently. Not a Taoist prayer, which is a simple affirmation of the way things are, but the ordinary kind, a personal demand. The rat skittered away. It had been there only two or three minutes, time enough to adulterate my pleasure. I wanted to tell Q., so as to rid my mind of it, but I also didn’t want to interrupt the spell of his voice. It had been so long since I’d heard it.
I did Antony again in Hong Kong, he said. Everyone there speaks English, you know. It’s a British territory, for a little while longer, at any rate. They loved it. They were rapt. When I died there was a hush in the theatre like I’d never heard before. It was my best death ever. The streets are a maze. The whole city is like a carnival. Honky-tonk. Hongy Kong. I miss you, cara.
When are you coming to New York? I asked.
I don’t know. Next month, maybe.
Did you fall in love lately?
No. I’m never in love. Or always—it’s the same thing. He laughed. Not right now. Someone is in love with me, though, a young woman working on the sets. Believe me, I never encouraged her, I don’t want any part of it. . . . Her boyfriend is in the cast, which makes it all rather—
Oh, don’t, I said. It’s just too boring.
You’re right. Look, Laura, I want to talk to you. In person, I mean. I have so many things to tell you. I want to hear everything about you. Did you get pregnant again?
No.
Do you want to?
No. I don’t know. I’m not sure.
You don’t still blame me for that? You know a miscarriage doesn’t happen that. . .
No, of course not.
What’s the matter? Why are you so quiet? Speak to me. Tell me things. Anything. I want to hear you speak. Is your husband around, is that it?
No, it’s that a rat just ran across the window ledge.
A rat? So what? He was on his way somewhere.
It distracted me. I’m starting a new book. It’s about a child.
I told him all about the book. As I spoke, its shape began to work itself out, the way a shape in a developing photograph gradually dislodges itself from the void of the background. All I would need to do now was write it down. Because he listened and concentrated, the book took shape. It would be a good book, I could tell, and I rejoiced. With Q. I could do anything.
It sounds wonderful. Write it down just the way you told it to me and it will be perfect, he said.
I know.
Silence.
Sometimes, he said, I think we made a terrible mistake. Or I did.
Yes, you did. Maybe not me.
Is it too late?
I don’t know. I think so.
(But I thought the opposite: No, come back, carry me off. Don’t ask, just do it. You ask so that I’ll release you. But it’s you who have the spell. Or is it? Who keeps us this way?)
Don’t say that. It makes me unhappy, he said.
You’ve earned it. Till next time.
I think of you.
I hung up and sat for a long time looking at the river. Finally I walked to the window ledge and saw that in a corner, the rat, or maybe rats, had built a small nest of twigs and hair and lint and ivy leaves. I’d have to clear it away. Not now, the rat might still be in the vicinity. Tomorrow.
Ev came in and paced about, taking a break.
“There’s a rat’s nest on the ledge, Ev. I saw a rat run across just a few minutes ago.”
“Are you sure it was a rat? Maybe it was a squirrel.”
I looked at him with bitterness. Q. never doubted me. “I’m sure. I can tell the difference. It had a thin curly tail.”
“Sounds like a rat, then.” There was no danger that he would ask who was on the phone. He rarely asked me personal questions.
Early the next morning while Ev slept, I got up and put on rubber gloves. Remembering Q. on the phone, I swept the rat’s nest into a plastic bag, tied it securely and dropped it in the kitchen garbage can. Ev would take down the garbage. He always did. I suspect his mother trained him, for he seemed to regard the garbage as his particular responsibility, like a dutiful child. After I was done I washed my hands of the rat.
I NEVER READ the paper on the night of the wrong Chinese dinner, but went back to bed after a while and fit my body against Tim’s. A cooling wind was rising off the river. When I woke it was almost nine—too late for the Tai Chi class—and I was alone. I thought I recalled Tim kissing me good-bye but I wasn’t sure. It might have been a dream, or a memory of some other morning or other kiss. Time no longer feels like a fluid medium carrying the world along, but has become the collapsible, teasing dimension scientists say it truly is. This morning’s kiss or some other kiss wasn’t the important distinction it once was (though whose kiss still mattered as much as ever). Nor do sleep and waking feel like very different states: they drift close and merge like clouds, blurring boundaries. I walk sleepily through the apartment, and asleep in my ardent bed I dream of writing: long passages about the seaside town where life is, or seems, simpler and more manageable than in the city, the book I’m writing for solace and as a kind of quest, a book for Ev. A book of more words, maybe, than we ever spoke together. I work out intrigues between the characters, little hurts and betrayals, secret loves among the librarians and schoolteachers and fishermen, the Moth Agent, the Constable, the Surveyor of Lumber, the Town Hall Janitor and the one Social Worker. Trysts and confrontations. None of this can I remember when I wake. Sometimes it feels pleasant to have sleep and waking no longer opposite states, just as it was pleasant to discover, as I grew up, that many accepted dichotomies are false: passion and reason, flesh and spirit. But this merging was not the product of mature wisdom. Sleep and waking are different. This was just one more symptom.
On the kitchen counter was a note from Tim. The only other evidence of his passage was the clean glass, the plate he must have used for toast, and the coffee mug resting in the dish rack. His notes to me while I sleep are businesslike, telegraphic; he’s used to dealing with secretaries. “Took the bumper to attach on my way, also your screwdriver, just in case. Dinner with clients tonight, I’ll phone when I get home, probably late. Call doctor. XXX Tim.” In style they compare poorly with Ev’s; Ev was, after all, a writer. Could he see me from on high he might feel some slight shame that I was seeing a man with no writing style to speak of. It wouldn’t help to cite Tim’s intelligence and many virtues. To Ev, the notes would be conclusive.
I switched on the radio, my lifeline. No television—I could make my own images. What I needed in the empty house was sounds, voices. Something sprightly and Baroque filled the air with the humming vibrations of the universe. Still there, beyond my private fog.
Then I called the doctor Ev used to see and made an appointment for two weeks off, the earliest they could fit me in. The moment I put the phone down I felt sicker—weak, achy, lost in mist—as if by making the appointment I had granted reality to the illness. It felt more like some evil spell, though. Could Q. be nearby, perhaps at Peter’s place in Chelsea, his spirit inhaling and sucking in my energy, that old black magic turned malignant with too much use? I hoped not, for his sake as much as mine, poor Q. He never intended any harm. A prince of a man.
From the front window I could see the Tai Chi class breaking up into small groups in the park below, the teacher and the interpreter walking off together as always. I checked the side window ledge. As I’d feared, the squirrel was back, nestled in a mound of dried ivy twigs and leaves. His body looked unusually hunched, even for a squirrel. My taps on the screen sent a wave of shudders over his rounded back, yet he didn’t skitter away. Couldn’t, or didn’t care any more, or both. He simply peered over his shoulder, showing a beady eye. Did he see me, and if so, what did the sight signify to him? I kicked but not too hard, for fear of breaking the screen: what if he climbed into the living room and settled in? I shuddered, too.
WHEN I DRAGGED MYSELF OUT TO MOVE MY CAR, Luke was leaning into the open hood of his polished maroon Cadillac with the sober, absorbed air of men inspecting their engines. Just as I was about to speak, he straightened up and turned. Like the Tai Chi teacher, he can sense people approaching from behind; it’s a matter of feeling vibrations.
“I’m doing okay,” he replied to my greeting, “specially now that I have a fine woman like you to rest my old eyes on.”
So it was that mood. You never knew. He was quixotic: now preoccupied with business and now paternal; angry at some local injustice or, bound for church Sunday mornings, gravely dapper. I appreciated his flirtatious mode though I was aware that Jilly and her friends would roll their eyes. Unless they’d find it acceptable on the grounds of cultural diversity.
I smiled wanly. “Something wrong with your car?”
“Nah, I’m just looking like I’m tinkering with it because they’s giving out tickets early today. They ain’t got no mercy lately.”
“It must be because the city is broke. They’re trying to raise money.”
“The city is broke? Well, we’s all broke,” he commented. Luke never looks broke, though, especially on Sundays in his double-breasted gray suit and gray fedora, ushering his three-generational, elegantly dressed family into the Cadillac. It was in this guise that I met him years ago when I was a newcomer to the block. He introduced himself formally and shook hands. Stocky, black, mustached, winning. Mid-fifties or so. (Over sixty, he confided later on.) The local community leader, possibly? Unnervingly good-looking, whatever he was. Days later I saw him in his navy blue super’s garb. He also minds cars, that is, moves them from one side of the street to the other at the appointed hours—a thriving business with weekly cash payments; his belt hangs heavy with keys. On most streets this complex auto dance is anarchic, every man for himself, but on ours it’s masterminded, as strict as a minuet.
“I saw your boyfriend putting the bumper back on this morning.”
“Yes, that was a new wrinkle. He found it lying on the ground. Did you see anyone back into me, by any chance?”
“You know I’da rung your bell if I had, Laura. I was away for a while, had to bring my car in to check the carburetor. These strangers come by, don’t know how to parallel park.”
“So, you said the cops are lurking?”
“Just round the bend. You better sit in it for a while, it’s still early. You’re lookin’ mighty sweet today.”
“Thanks. You don’t look so bad yourself.”
“Ah, I’m an old fellow now. You shoulda seen me forty, fifty years ago.”
I wished I had. Luckily, halfway up the street, a history professor from next door was just pulling out in a very respectable Chrysler. When he saw me he waved and waited. We locals have developed a sensitivity to the gait of people scurrying to move their cars, one of those traits nurtured by environmental demands. I waved back gratefully and moved as fast as I could. How were his wife and daughter, I wondered. Months ago, he’d told me they had some mysterious illness. An epidemic? He looked cheerful enough, so they were probably still alive. I must bear that in mind. I found the bumper securely fastened, looking as if it had never left its post.
Once more to bed, compliant as a milk-filled infant put down for her afternoon nap, as a besotted bride gently nudged yet again onto the mattress. Suddenly came the high-pitched beep of a truck backing up. Like a metronome it beeped with murderous precision, the sound waves oozing through my skin, setting every cell pulsing in response like an audience clapping in rhythm. The beep became my heartbeat, pulsebeat, bloodbeat. Like the muted cooing of pigeons, the electronic beep has something of the toneless, sneakered approach of death. “Man goeth to his long home,” read a graveyard inscription Ev showed me up on the Cape, “and the mourners goeth about the streets.” The beep was their dirge. My flesh beeped, my skin beeped, I was distilled to a mere echo, and after a while I didn’t even long for it to stop. I was wedded to the pain of it, and wonder of wonders, I fell asleep in it and dreamed in it. Q. dreams.
DREAMS BROKEN CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT by the phone. My parents down in Florida in an overturned car, my father’s precious glasses shattered? Shouldn’t they be tucked in by now, watching Arsenio? I reached out a sandbag arm and picked up.
“Hi, Laura.”
“Jilly!” I hadn’t felt that spurt of love at the sound of a voice for some time. “Where are you?”
“Let me see. If it’s Tuesday this must be . . . Seattle. Yes, I’m pretty sure. I’m in my friend Chrissie’s apartment, I know that much.”
She was spending the summer going through the country by train and, I feared, hitchhiking, stopping wherever she had friends from college, or friends of friends. Why? To see. To flee. To stay in motion.
“So what’s it like, all alone on a train? Do you talk to people?”
“It’s great. I’ve been all over. Colorado, Montana, Washington. I’ve met lots of people, though there are some you’d rather not talk to, if you know what I mean. Some people are, like, too friendly?”
“I hope you know how to take care of yourself.”
“Oh, it’s not that. It’s not men. Most of the men are with their wives anyway, and they’re old couples, fifty, sixty. They want to take care of me, you know? What’s a young girl like me—that’s what they call me, a young girl, like I was six—doing traveling all by herself? One couple from Wyoming wanted to take me home with them. Then for about three days there was this other old couple sitting behind me. The man was compelled to say everything twice. ‘Colorado sure is beautiful,’ he would say to his wife. ‘Yup, Colorado sure is beautiful.’ In the morning when everyone’s getting up: ‘Honey, have you seen my razor? Honey, have you seen my razor?’ And then after he came back from shaving, ‘Just look at that bridge! Will you just look at that bridge!’ By the time we reached California I was so exasperated I wanted to turn around and say to him, ‘Must you repeat everything twice? Must you repeat everything twice?’ Anyway, in San Francisco I met my friend Barry. I met my friend Barry. He had his father’s car. He had his father’s car. We went—”
“Stop!” I laughed. “Enough! Enough!”
“Actually, this guy gave me an idea for a performance piece we could do in the fall at school. Take a play, any well-known play, say, Hamlet or A Streetcar Named Desire, and perform it with all the lines done twice. After every line there’d be this echo from offstage that would represent, sort of, how after the actor speaks the line, it echoes in the audience’s mind? What do you think of that?”
“I think it could take an awfully long time.”
“Oh, we’d have a food break, you know, sell sandwiches in between or something,” she said blithely.
“Or you could do it with a simultaneous translation into some other language, so it becomes a bilingual version. The way they do with sign language for the deaf.”
“Except no one knows languages anymore. Though that might make it even better. So how are you doing, Laura?”
I told her the truth, the whole truth, complete with fevers and chills and all the rest.
“Oh, you poor thing. That’s awful.”
Ah, joy! Barely into my forties and already longing to be mothered by my child. Not technically my child but I like to pretend she is. My feelings are more simple and easy than a true mother’s, and no wonder—I’ve had mostly weekends and summers, the good times. Jilly doesn’t get along very well with her actual mother, which is common enough at nineteen, but I never bad-mouth Margot. It’s not so much decency on my part as pragmatism. Someday they’ll be reconciled, and I don’t want to be rejected in turn as the anti-mother.
“Aside from the doctor, Laura, you can do a few things for yourself. Don’t smoke, for starters. Eat right. Clean up your act.”
Jilly was always big on cleaning things up. Even as a small child, when she came to spend weekends with Ev and me she would straighten her room and make the bed on Sundays, leaving hardly a trace. It was as if she wanted us to think her visit only a happy dream, I used to tell him, from which we must wake sadly on Sunday nights. Or maybe she resented his new marriage as much as Tony did, and was making it clear this wasn’t her home. But Ev said ruefully that it was nothing so elaborate, she was just very neat, like her mother.
“It sounds like you might have one of those chronic fatigue viruses,” she suggested. “Find out about it. First of all, get a book. Go into your local—”
“Jilly, I know how to get a book. That’s one thing I do know how to do.”
“A book from a health food store,” she continued. “Don’t do everything the book says, just what appeals to you? Like, don’t give up everything you like to eat. That can be very depressing. For instance, you could go on a macrobiotic diet but I know you, you’d bitch about it and cancel out all the benefits. And while you’re there, buy some stuff for energy. Ginseng. Bee pollen.”
“Bee pollen?”
“It’s very good for you.”
“You sound like a witch.”
“The Women’s Studies program offers a course in witchcraft but I haven’t taken it yet.”
“I would think it’d be in the chemistry department. It so happens I was in a health food store a few weeks ago. I was passing by when I got these sudden hunger pangs. I thought if I didn’t eat something that very minute I’d die, so I got a little box of apricot cookies and ripped them open right there. This terrible musty odor rose up, sort of like dried manure. They were the most awful cookies I ever had. I can’t imagine what was in them.”
“That’s because we’re so used to the artificial smells of processed food that we’re turned off by the natural smells. Your hunger is probably hypoglycemia. You have to eat often, in small amounts. Take a banana wherever you go. Listen, Laura, I have a great idea for us. Next month we’ll go up to the Cape. Grandma and Grandpa promised themselves a break from the tourists this year, so they’re going away to some Elder-hostel thing, whatever that is, it sounds like a summer camp for senior citizens, and they want someone to take care of the house. I said I’d do it but my mom doesn’t want me staying up there alone, so this’ll be perfect. Wouldn’t it? Remember all those summers?”
Her voice caught and stopped, leaving a silence vast with the night breath of mountains and prairies between us. She was thinking, as was I, of the summers we used to spend there on the sandy soil Ev’s family had rooted in for generations, Portuguese immigrants gradually taking on the look and sound of Yankees, losing their men to the sea, and of how her father would plunge the umbrella into the sand as if, like his ancestors, he were staking out a claim, then carry her into deep water and hold her above the waves.
“The ocean has great healing powers,” she said, recovering herself. “It’s the salt.”
Yes, that I could believe. And it smells good, too. “It would be lovely. But they haven’t asked me. Maybe they’d feel...” Maybe I’d feel... is what I mean. Ev’s old house, his room, his town, his everything.
“They’ll feel fine. They would have asked you sooner or later. You know how they leave things to the last minute. I’ll find a waitressing job up there. Or if not I can always pump gas another summer. They hired two extra guys but it’s sure to be busy.” Ev’s parents had a gas station and small convenience store on Route 6. We’d all taken our turns pumping gas. “Come on, say yes. Then I won’t have to stay home with my mother and that wimp she married. He keeps cross-examining me about—”
“Uh-oh. I don’t like the sound of this, Jilly. I have a feeling your mother won’t like it either.”
“No, she’ll be grateful whether she knows it or not. It makes her tense, having me around. Besides, somebody has to take care of you. I bet that lawyer isn’t any use.” Outsiders interfered with Jilly’s storybook vision of her father and me. She’d be horrified if she knew about Q. She also had no idea how hopeless Ev would have been with illness. He’d have managed to get sent to Peru to cover El Sendero Luminoso rather than act as nurse.
“He does what he can.” I told her how Tim rescued my bumper but she seemed unimpressed.
“Okay, we’ll figure out the details later. I’ve got to go. That’s Call Waiting.”
The sea. A month with Jilly. A future that mirrored the past. Would I be able to swim or take long walks or ride a bike as we did in our early days? Ev taught Jilly to ride the waves. I taught her to float in the salty bay. We watched the tides move in and out in their comforting motion, always the same yet always slightly different, an inexhaustible range of nuance as in a dance—same steps and pattern but each performance unique, depending on the breath and energy of the dancers and the mood of the air embracing them. I’d watch the tides again, this time without imagining my future mysteriously contained in their patterns, unknown and thrilling, sometimes frightening. That future was the past now.
I could work up there, gather data for the book about Ev’s town. It wasn’t coming to me at all here in New York, but on its home ground it would invent itself, from the taste of the air and roll of the water, the history and the hills. Like the Samurai creed in the book the Tai Chi teacher gave me: “I have no design; I make opportunity my design.”
An eerie stiffness crept up my arms and legs, as if they were slowly sinking into a granular state. I pictured the inner landscape, its clotted waterways. Not quite stone. Pre-stone. Sand. I tested each arm and leg to make sure they still moved. Yes, but they were astonishingly heavy. A sandbag woman, body on its way to stone.
The phone rang again. What now?
Laura, my love. Did I wake you?
Q.
It’s been bedlam here at Peter’s. That’s why I’m calling so late. I’m sorry if I scared you.
He’d been in town for three days, working, staying as usual at his ex-brother-in-law’s place in Chelsea, and he had an excellent excuse for not having called sooner—only a venial sin on his permanent record card. Chaos and grief filled the apartment. Peter’s lover, Arthur, was in the hospital, dying.
It’s dreadful, Laura. I mean, Arthur, of all people. I’ve known him so long. He and Peter lasted longer than Susan and I did. I knew he was HIV positive—remember, I must have told you—but he’d been okay for years. . . . Then it hit all at once.
That’s awful. Is this really the end or can they keep him going awhile?
I doubt it. I haven’t seen him, they’re not letting visitors in, but Peter says he won’t be coming home. He’s in a wild state. He says he can’t bear the apartment without Arthur in it. He found a place a few blocks away and he’s packing madly. Maybe it’s a way of avoiding his grief.
Oh, the apartment. I always thought of it as ours—I mean years ago.
I know, said Q. I can’t imagine not having it to go to either. But maybe we could get used to the new one. He cries while he packs, and hurls things around, you know, photos, mementos, stuff like that.
It doesn’t sound like avoidance.
I guess not. In between packing he goes to the hospital. He’s neglecting the store. When I come back at night I have to hold him in my arms while he cries some more. It’s very unlike Peter. You know how he is.
(Yes, I do. Close-mouthed. Prim, the pair of them. Over the years I’d run into them when rendezvousing with Q. Not often, though. Peter owns a rare-books store and Arthur was an editor at a business magazine, so that Q., when he visited, had the place to himself most days. Still, we were careful. When they turned up we managed to be drinking tea in the living room, conversing decorously. Only once was there a close call. Shit, I forgot, said Q. as we tore off our clothes with one hand each. Peter’s coming home at four. Oh, I said. And what time is it now? He climbed over me to pull a watch out of the night table drawer. Twenty to four. We’ll manage, I said cavalierly. But Laura, he moaned, it takes time to get dressed and make the tea. About six minutes, I said. He set upon me, laughing and grunting. He’ll be here in ten minutes, he moaned. Peter’s compulsively prompt. So what? I said. The door is closed. I’m shy about these things, said Q. I was married to his sister, remember. And he’s so proper. Don’t rush me, I said, giggling, it sets me back. Less is more, as in art. Oh, shush, Laura. Basta. This is no time for intellect. Think porn.
(At four o’clock Peter found us in the living room, dressed and reading from a script. There hadn’t been time to make the tea. We often read. I would be Q.’s straight man as he went over his lines. Happy Days, I believe it was, in which Beckett, though it was surely not his primary intention, captures the essence of latter-day marriage: the women is buried up to her neck in sand and the man seems not to notice.)
I can’t describe what’s been going on here the last few days, said Q. Friends are in and out. Plus the movers, giving estimates. But listen, Laura, come tomorrow. No, wait. Not tomorrow. Susan is coming to see Peter. You don’t want to meet up with her. The day after.
I’ll have to call in the morning and let you know if I’m up to it. I can’t say definitely.
Please say definitely, Laura. I need to see you and my dance card is getting all filled up, as it were.
Your dance card. Your dance card! Are you telling me you’re going to have to fit me in?
It’s just an expression. Come on, don’t get on your high horse. I’m dying to see you.
You can just die then, and they can bury your dance card with you.
Jesus, you’re touchy. More than ever. What’s wrong? Are you sick?
I’ll tell you when I see you.
Tell me now.
All right, forgive me, then. It was an unfortunate remark.
I forgave him. I knew his needs. Like a giant doomed to eat damsels, Q. must fill a vast daily quota of attention and adulation from varied sources. In a small town he might run out of people, but by keeping in constant motion, he’s in no such danger. The only danger is to those suppliers of attention who expect some continuity of response, who fail to understand that for Q. people are an inexhaustible natural resource for his sustenance and delight, like air or water or sunshine. You are my sunshine, he sang to me in jovial moments; not for a long time did I realize he meant it literally.
Okay, then, you’ll come. Because I must tell you about this movie I’m in. It’s silly but fun. I play a righteous cop. Can you imagine? I never played a cop before. I have to get into a cop mentality. You can help me.
Me? I’m no expert on cops. Just because of—
No, no, I didn’t mean because of that. I mean you’re strict. You have principles. That’s a start.