“Call the doctor at ten o’clock Monday morning for the results of the blood tests,” Cindy, the receptionist, said as I left.
“The doctor isn’t in now,” she said on Monday morning at ten. “You can call back at eleven.”
I took out the stack of pages I’d been working on, about Ev’s town, but couldn’t concentrate.
At eleven: “The doctor isn’t in now. Try him in an hour or so.” The voice sounded awfully stern for Cindy. It sounded like Cindy’s mother, or a Cindy considerably aged and hardened over the past week, like cheese.
“You told me to call at eleven.”
“He’s out on an emergency. Try at about one.”
I forced myself at least to read over what I’d written—an easy part, about the family house I’d soon be staying in with Jilly.
“The house rests on one of the town’s many low, rounded hills with the air of someone settled in for a long stay: an old Cape Cod house more roomy than it appears from outside, its lines as simple as the houses children draw in their first pictures, with square boxes for windows and a brick chimney rising firm and squat from the A-shaped roof.
Through gales and hurricanes and the intermittent sun of over a century, its shingles have weathered to a gray soft as cloud, and in the misty early mornings, the house seen from a distance seems no more than a denser patch of mist. Toward mid-morning, as the sun burns off the fog and brightens the salty air, the color of the house darkens, so that by early afternoon it stands clear against the deepening blue of a broad sky. The soil around the house is thin and dry, covered by low drab shrubs with here and there a cluster of flowers springing up as if by accident, blazing tiger lilies or daffodils or impatiens. Farther back is an ancient toolshed, upright and neat, and behind that the brush dissolves into woods. Similar houses nearby are screened from view by the trees.”
Not too bad, but I was in no state, to judge, couldn’t quite get my mind around it.
“The doctor isn’t in yet,” said the voice at one-fifteen. “Try again at about four-thirty.”
“But at four-thirty I’ll be out. I have an appointment.” Querulous. Very poor strategy.
“Well, keep trying, that’s all I can say.”
“Can’t you tell me the results?”
“No, only the doctor can do that.”
Could be pretty bad, if she wasn’t allowed to tell.
I pushed on. “Though it was built in 1877, the house is well sealed and well heated. It was built for comfort and tended to, despite the legacy of sadness that seeped through the family generation after generation the way damp seeps into the walls of other houses, making them moldy and chill. Indeed, the damp is hard to avoid, what with the sea to the east and the bay to the west and the river, as a bonus, running through the already watery town—the Pamet River, named for the Indians whose place this was before the Pilgrims landed some nine miles north.”
Pilgrims and Indians seemed very far away, maybe too far for my purposes. It was a relief to give up at four o’clock and join Mona at our favorite local hangout, the Café Athena. Every few days we would sit lengthily at one of the scarred wooden tables beside the open windows and watch Broadway’s passing scene; if friends went by we pulled them in to join us. The food was mediocre at best, in fact patrons had been known to bring their own. It took skill to catch the attention of the help—actors and graduate students so engrossed with their chatter at the kitchen door that they had to be coerced to stop by. The Athena had a collection of two tapes, repeated in alternation all day long: The Four Seasons and Handel’s Water Music. Outside, buses lumbered past, beggars lurched.
“Remind me,” I told Mona, “at four-thirty I have to make a phone call.”
“Okay. Speaking of phone calls, I just spoke to Madelyn Prescott yesterday. She’s coming to New York pretty soon and she’s going to stay with us for about nine days.”
“That’s a long time for a guest. Do you mind?”
“Not at all. She’s an ideal guest, a real pro. Last time I hardly knew she was there. She goes out in the morning and stays out all day and most nights doesn’t even show up for dinner. When she does she often makes her own food because she’s a vegetarian. She’s living near Santa Fe now. Raising llamas.”
“Llamas? Like in Doctor Dolittle? Listen, let’s try waving at them. I’d love an iced tea.”
“Why don’t I just go up and ask. It’ll be quicker.” Mona slithered off in her feline way. “Yes, llamas,” she said, sitting down again. “It seems they’re very sweet and people do quite well raising them.”
“What for?”
“Well, people rent them for treks in the mountains. That son of thing. But she’s not that far along yet. They’re very expensive and she’s starting small, with just two, I believe. The idea is that when they’re ready she’ll breed them. They’re cuter than camels or mules, she says. Oh, she’s also a Buddhist now.”
“That figures. Llamas. Tibet. There are Buddhists in Tibet. The Dalai Lama. Remember we went to hear him speak at Columbia last fall? Compassion, he said. Overcoming anger.”
“Yes, that’s all well and good, but the kind of llamas she raises are from Peru, it so happens. How’s it going?” she asked Daria, the anthropology student bringing the drinks.
“They’re closing us in two weeks. Didn’t you see the notice on the door?”
“No. How come?” Mona’s usually composed face was stricken.
“Cineplex Odious is buying the movie next door and the whole building and they want everyone out. It’s not that they’re actually throwing us out, just, like, quadrupling the rent. What’s happening all over town.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I asked. “Protest or picket, like in the old days?”
“I think it’s too far gone for that,” said Daria.
“I’ll ask Tim. A friend of mine, a lawyer. Maybe he can suggest something.”
“I doubt if Tim would be much help,” said Mona with asperity. “He’s a corporate lawyer, remember? He’s on the other side.”
“I always forget. It must be denial. How about your brother Carl, then? Does he do cases like this, or just violence?”
“Thanks for the sentiment,” said Daria, “but I think it’s a done deal. You could speak to the owner, though, and find out for sure.” She nodded toward the carrot-haired balding man who usually sat in a corner drinking coffee, reading thick books and taking notes in a steno pad.
“I will,” said Mona. “What will happen to you?”
“I’ll go across the street to the Indian place, I guess. The only trouble is, you really have to work there.” She slouched away, pulling up her sagging jeans.
“This is very unsettling,” I said. “Two weeks! It’s like being evicted. We’ll have to find someplace else. So, about those llamas, can you also shear them for wool or am I thinking of alpacas?”
“You’re thinking of alpacas, Laura. I thought I might make a little dinner when Madelyn’s in town. Invite some of the people we used to know, see what they’re up to. Sort of a reunion.”
The downtown group where I met Q. We also did a season of summer stock on the Jersey shore—old favorites: Mrs. Warrens Profession. Guys and Dolls. Peter Pan. I was an Indian. I can’t remember who Madelyn was. Tinker Bell? Mona did the costumes, but left the theatre soon after—impossible while raising children, she said, with the husbands coming and going. She started her own business. Let Me Dress You was now a thriving concern with the lowest possible overhead; one room in her apartment held the treasures she gleaned from thrift shops all over town. She talked at length to her clients—wealthy East Siders to working-girl types newly arrived from the provinces—like a therapist doing an intake interview, took their measurements, then went out and found wardrobes to suit their desired identity. Help Recycle, she advertised. The Most Painless Makeover in New York. Most of the time she herself wore jeans and a T-shirt, as if scorning a busman’s holiday, but now and then she would turn up looking like one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens or Madame de Staël’s guests. “Identity is fluid,” said an Art Deco poster hanging in the alcove she called her dressing room. No inconsistencies bothered her, a postmodernist let loose in the world of fashion. Low fashion.
“So what do you think, Laura? Would that be fun? A little dinner?”
“Sure, very nice.”
How nice was questionable. I preferred to gossip about Madelyn rather than see her. Still, dinner at Mona’s was always worthwhile since she was a gourmet cook. And it seemed only fair that one should pay for unrestricted gossip (llamas!) by actually seeing the person, which in turn would provide more material for the data bank. . . .
Mona, the provident, checked her watch. “It’s four-thirty, Laura.”
“Oh, thanks.” The doctor was in! Yes, I’d wait. The phone was on the wall across the room at the bar, where the sounds of buses and car alarms were less acute, but three seated men were bellowing over some baseball contretemps, while the gang of graduate student and dancer waiters tittered over someone’s audition for Miss Saigon, not to mention the Vivaldi tape. Autumn. When the doctor came on I could barely hear him.
“It looks like you do have something,” he began.
“Leukemia or hepatitis?” I wanted to say it first myself. “AIDS? Lupus?”
“No, nothing like that.” I caught something about mononucleosis. Not mono itself but a relative of. Often its aftermath, like the dessert. This doctor of Ev’s was a poet manqué, another metaphor maker. My just deserts?
“But I never had mono. Not that I know of.”
“You had it sometime in the past. You have the antibodies. You just weren’t aware of it.”
So much for my powers of awareness, in which I took such pride. Still, what a relief. Just then the espresso machine began roaring and I strained to hear. A little-understood virus, I gathered.
“It usually takes about four to six months.” His next words were pulverized along with the Colombian coffee beans.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well. Could you repeat that, please?”
“I said, don’t be surprised or alarmed if you get strange aches and pains or feel very fatigued.”
“Oh.”
More fractured words. I felt rather heady, knowing I had something mysterious and tenacious though not fatal. Neurasthenia, it sounded like. All those Victorian heroines we thought were stifled by the patriarchal system—was it just a virus? Would this discovery bring down Women’s Studies?
“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing. I’m in a bar. I tried calling earlier several times, but I couldn’t reach you.”
He didn’t say—or perhaps he did for all I knew—If you’re so sick what are you doing in a bar?, but he might have thought it. Standing firm and persisting, I thought in reply. Continuing.
I caught something about “titers.” Or was it “’taters”? Should I eat potatoes instead of watercress? Was he Southern? Irish? My titers were high, he seemed to be saying. I didn’t know what titers were but I couldn’t ask him to repeat again, not that it would have done any good, what with the Four Seasons and the waiters and all the rest. I’d look it up later. Or ask Tony, my stepson. Surely he was a doctor by now, or far enough along to know the lingo. I hated to ask him anything, seeing that he’d been angry at me since he was eleven, but this wasn’t much.
“Is there anything I can take for it?”
“I’m sorry to say there isn’t a thing I can do for you. We don’t know enough about this. Take good care of yourself. Get plenty of rest and wait it out. It’ll pass. Don’t treat yourself like an invalid. On the other hand, don’t overdo things. And don’t let anyone try to tell you you’re malingering. It’s really a virus. Your titers are very high.”
No, it definitely wasn’t about potatoes.
I couldn’t help feeling a kind of pride about those titers, whatever they were. “Thank you,” I said, as if he’d paid me a compliment. But he sensibly took this as a close to our conversation.
“Call me if you have any other questions.”
Happily he had no odd questions himself.
“So?” inquired Mona.
She was both skeptical and concerned. A bonus: she knew about titers. She’d been a chemistry major in college, a tidbit I hadn’t known. Good for the data bank.
“They keep diluting your blood—titration, it’s called—and the number of titers is how many dilutions in which the blood still shows traces of the virus. Or of the antibodies, to be precise. So how many titers did you have?”
“I couldn’t hear the number exactly. It was too noisy. In the low two hundreds, maybe? Does that sound reasonable?”
Mona’s green eyes widened. I didn’t really care how many. I was more intrigued by the wonderful metaphor. How many dilutions would it take to get the image of Ev’s bloody neck out of me, or Q.’s vacillations, or Tony’s resentment, and a dozen other sickening components? If I put myself through a wringer would I come out dry and pure, an amnesiac like Ronald Colman in Random Harvest? (Tim and I watched that a few weeks ago; he has a flair for choosing old films.)
Mona didn’t say anything soothing or encouraging. That wasn’t her style. But she did invite me to come home with her and stay for dinner.
“If you don’t mind having dinner with my mother, that is. She’s staying with us for a few days. Actually I should get going. It’s close to five, Dave’s away, and I’ve left her alone long enough. Okay?”
“Sure, thanks. How is Evelyn these days?”
“You’ll see for yourself,” she said curtly.
Evelyn was asleep in the guest room when we arrived, and I, too, took a nap on the living room couch while Mona went to work her magic spells in the kitchen. Hours must have passed; when I woke the light was waning. I was sitting near the big picture windows gazing out at the river when I heard shuffling steps—Mona coming from the guest room, half pushing, half leading her mother as if she were a large package on a dolly. I had met Evelyn several times over the years, before the Alzheimer’s had set in; she used to sing, I recalled, in amateur theatricals and church choirs. She looked a bit dazed now, but no more so than someone just awakened. She was a slender, olive-skinned woman with hazel eyes and silvery hair stylishly cut. In her light print dress with a wide belt (surely not one of Mona’s acquisitions), her white sandals and rose-painted toenails, she might have been a fashion model for Modern Maturity.
“It’s Laura, Mom. Remember Laura?”
“I’m not sure we’ve met.” The hand she offered reluctantly was cool and limp. “Are you Mona’s friend from the flea market?”
“No, I’m a writer.”
She sat down beside me and looked out the window. I followed her westward gaze, where the purple light was deepening, with a greenish tinge.
“Don’t worry if you don’t get a response,” said Mona. “She tunes out a lot these days. Come, dinner’s all ready.”
At the table beside the window, she had set out a feast of roast chicken with rosemary, green rice and salad. Mona sat at my left, her back to the river and the view, facing Evelyn. She put food on Evelyn’s plate, and every so often Evelyn speared a morsel and brought it absently to her mouth. Meanwhile, the lights across the river gradually came on—a follow-the-dots puzzle—and the lordly Hudson took on a sheen. Beyond it, to the south, glittered a magical little enclave resembling Oz, which Mona informed us was actually Hoboken, New Jersey.
“If it’s a nice day tomorrow I think we’ll drive out to the country. How would you like that, Mom, an afternoon in the country?”
“Take me out to the ball game,’” Evelyn sang, and I suppressed a giggle.
“It’s all right, you can laugh. She doesn’t mind. A little lower, Mom, okay?” Evelyn was belting out, “‘I don’t care if we never get back.’” “How about some iced tea?”
Evelyn nodded. “‘I’m a little teapot, short and stout,’” she sang. “That’s what you used to sing in school, Mona.” She held the glass quite steadily, I noticed. She might have lost her grip mentally, but things did not leap from her hands as they did from mine. I was being quite careful with my glass and silverware and napkin.
“‘Here is my handle, here is my spout.’” She did the hand motions just as Jilly used to do.
Suddenly a streak of color exploded outside and I sat upright to stare toward Hoboken. “Fireworks!” I cried. “It’s fireworks across the river. Look!”
“Well, well,” said Mona. “Quite a display, isn’t it?”
Evelyn clapped her hands with delight, then turned to me and smiled. It was a professional show of splendidly cosmic proportions, loud and brilliant, one of the rewards of living in this decaying yet exuberant city. The noise suggested a major battle taking place just out of sight, with the lights its visual expression. The best moments were the suspenseful dark times before the outbursts, the waiting for unimaginable wonders.
“This is fantastic,” I said. “It must be for July Fourth. But that’s a few days away, isn’t it?”
“It’s coming from Hoboken. Maybe they’ve been misinformed over in Jersey,” said Mona, swiveling for a brief glance. “So about my little reunion party when Madelyn’s here. . . . I’ll have to start calling people.
Too bad Quinn isn’t around. We could use someone like that, to hold forth, tell stories.”
“He’s in town, as a matter of fact, but I think he’ll be gone by then. I just had lunch with him. I forgot to tell you. He was full of stories, yes. Mostly about love. He’s compelled, like the ancient mariner. He thinks love in any form is the most fascinating story.” I didn’t add that I thought so, too. So did Evelyn, apparently.
“‘Oh, my man, I love him so,’” she sang in a beautiful contralto, “‘he’ll never know. ...”’
“It never lets up with you two, does it?” said Mona. “It’s like a soap opera where the actors have a lifetime contract. They have to keep writing scenes for them.”
Outside, a huge purple dandelion erupted over the river, scattering light like seeds. Evelyn grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Isn’t this fantastic?” she said. “It’s better than in the old days. A few things are better than in the old days.”
“The Chinese invented fireworks,” I said. “They used it at all their great festivals, my Tai Chi teacher once mentioned, to scare off the demons that come out at night.”
“Is that so?” said Evelyn. “And what happens when the festivals are over? Do the demons come back?”
“I guess so. I didn’t ask. Actually, I’ve decided that what Q. really is is a flasher,” I told Mona. “Oh, not literally,” I hastened to amend, as Evelyn blinked and sat up straight with a disapproving frown. “Not a weirdo. He’s every inch the gentleman—Laurence Olivier as Hamlet is his idol. A prince of a man. I mean an emotional flasher. He has to give you a quick and shocking peek at who he is and what he looks like underneath. And while no one likes a real flasher, this kind has a certain appeal. To judge from the results, at any rate.”
“That’s quite good,” Mona remarked, as if I had constructed a minor work of art, as certain conversational gambits are. A scaled-down version of performance art. “Very good, Laura.”
“Thank you.” We paused for another magnificent shower, blue and yellow petals strewn through the sky. Faintly, in the distance, a fire engine wailed.
Evelyn, who had been crooning to herself, sang out, ‘He isn’t true, He beats me, too.’”
“Oh, no.” I turned to face her. “It’s nothing like that. You’ve got the wrong idea.”
“It’s only a song,” said Evelyn. “Don’t get all worked up. Look, the stars are coming out. What was the rhyme you used to love?” she asked Mona.
“‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star.’”
“‘How I wonder where you are,’” said Evelyn.
“‘Up above the world so high, Like a . . . Like a . . .’?” Mona coaxed.
“Diamond!” said Evelyn at last. “‘Like a diamond in the sky.’” She rose abruptly and began striding haughtily across the room.
“Hey, wait, Mom. Where are you going?”
“I have to make a phone call. What did you think? I’m not totally out of things yet, you know.”
“Who are you calling?”
“A friend. Do you mind?” From the back, as she turned into the bedroom, she seemed girlish, the frothy dress fluttering about her slim legs.
“The reason I asked,” murmured Mona, “is that she’s taken to calling people she hasn’t seen in years, sometimes in the middle of the night, to tell them what she thinks of them.”
“You’re very patient,” I said. “It’s a wonder you get any work done.”
“It’s not so difficult yet. When I’m working at home she can stay here with me, and the rest of the time I have people with her in her apartment. No, the worst is to come. Actually I find it easier to talk to her this way. I tell her things I wasn’t able to say before. She was nothing like she is now. Very businesslike. Believe me, I’m more maternal to her than she ever was to me. I don’t know where all the nursery rhymes and getting thrilled over fireworks are coming from. What’s the matter, are you okay?”
“Just tired. I’ll help you clean up and then I’d better go home.”
“Never mind that. Shall I walk you? It’s a nice night.”
“Walk? Are you kidding? No, I’ll take a cab. Thanks. I’m sorry to cut this short.”
As soon as the doctor offered his diagnosis I began feeling sicker, as if official recognition, like election to political office, had granted my virus a license for all sorts of bad behavior.
A real illness. Not grief or guilt in translation, not urban decay or environmental pollution, witchcraft or the movement of the tides. A man of science ought to know. Don’t let anyone accuse you of malingering, he said.
Little did he know how much I’d like to malinger, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it. I keep shuffling to my desk to work on my book, give Ev a better destiny. I leaf through notes or old Town Reports, tinker with a phrase here and there, until my brain short-circuits. Lights out. I sit holding the thin manuscript on my lap like a mother in a famine-struck land with nothing to offer her baby, hoping it will grow from love alone.
There are a few things I can still do, though, such as buy groceries. The first strategy in the face of danger is to keep to routine. Persist. Flexibility is all very well, but not until called for. I’ve heard what happens to people who let go, especially if they live alone. It starts with not going out to buy food. Soon I wouldn’t bother to dress or comb my hair, would even leave off washing. I wouldn’t make the bed, since I’m so often in it or on it. Yes, it is my lover, but in time lovers stop preening for each other and allow themselves to be seen in disarray, even dishevelment.
With no food in the house I might stop eating altogether, though more likely, not being of an anorexic persuasion, I’d languidly lift the phone to order a pizza or Chinese food (my sallow tinge and yeasty smell shocking the young fellow who bikes it over to the door), then leave the remains—burnt crusts, white cardboard cartons with soy sauce dripping out the bottom—wherever I happened to be at the last bite, probably in bed, where one day I’d be found—Mona or Joyce or Jilly or even Q. having prevailed upon the super to open the door since I’d given up answering the phone—my hair matted and my face gray, my eyes dimmed and my fingers on the coverlet making the faint clutching motions of the dying or the mad, the apartment musty with cobwebs and Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate all unraveled on the tape player. As Q., years ago, unforgettably described finding his father in his Georgetown house, after Aldo was widowed and had retired from the Italian diplomatic service. Q. never dreamed it was only the beginning. Since then Aldo has been in and out of mental hospitals more times than I can count. Depression, the experts call it. He’s lost his joie de vivre, is what Q. says. He and his sister Gemma are summoned to Washington at crises to confer with doctors, defrost the refrigerator, air out the house and buy clothing in different sizes, for Aldo’s weight fluctuates wildly when he’s at his worst. At the hospital where he’s been carted off, they jump-start his life with pills. What else? says Q. That’s definitely not performance art.
So my kitchen is well stocked, not the larder of a person who daydreams of jumping from windows, for art or for real.
Then there’s the telephone, after the radio my other lifeline. I really ought to call my cousin Joyce but I’m afraid. She might be so concerned that I’d end up having to console her. The delicate calibration of sympathy is, like cooking, an art everyone dabbles in but few, alas, do to perfection. Scrumptious though it is, sympathy must be offered in exactly the right tone to be effective, and in exactly the right proportions, like salt or spices. Too little leaves you deprived or dissatisfied, while too much can make you gag.
Joyce’s sympathy can be boundless, a flash flood sweeping off everything in its path on a tide of commiseration. Her praise is the same, wildly exceeding its object. When I appeared in my first walk-on, two-line role in a gritty church basement theatre on an East Village street of abandoned buildings, she was as proud as if I’d done Lady Macbeth at the Old Vic. “Stop it,” I hissed, “you’re embarrassing me.” “What do you mean?” she protested in her symphonic tones. “I’m so thrilled I could weep.” “Well, don’t,” I warned. What if I really were playing Lady Macbeth? She leaves no margin.
Joyce herself knows no bounds, a lushly unkempt, radiant woman whose tremulous musical voice pours from her throat like liquid gold, an anthropologist who has attached herself and her professional future to a small tribe in West Africa (though she tells me I must call it an ethnic group or, even better, a native nation). She blossomed out of the ruddy, good-hearted girl I played with growing up. I was an only child and Joyce became the self-styled big sister, the point man, so to speak, for perilous ventures into the steamy jungles of adolescence. Didactic, protective, she got everywhere five years ahead and passed along the word on menstruation, sex, and filling out college applications.
“Oh, that’s awful,” she said soothingly over the phone. A mild molassesy tone. “I had a feeling all wasn’t well when I didn’t hear from you in so long. But look, you’ll carry on. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Tell me if there’s anything I can do.”
She meant it, too. It was she who appeared, scarves whirling, to take me to the hospital in a cab the long-ago night I had the miscarriage. And later when Ev died, she arrived promptly, bracelets jangling, to manage everything. Still, I kept a wary distance.
“I will. Thanks.”
“You sound very low. I can hear it in your voice. But look, you’re strong, Laura. You’ll rally. Look, I don’t know whether this would help, but you could try my physical therapist. She does excellent massages for aches and pains.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I really feel terrible for you. What a thing to happen. I’d be utterly devastated. Not to be able to—Oh, I can imagine how—”
Ah, here we go. The waters had been gathering slowly. I started to say good-bye before they split the dam of self-restraint. We arranged to have lunch as soon as I got back from the Cape.
“If you like, I’ll come by for you in a cab.”
“No, thanks, Joyce. I can manage.”
I KEEP GOING. Continue, as the Tai Chi teacher says. Persevere in my own being, as I once had a brave heroine who knew Spinoza do in the face of adversity greater than my own. How easy it is to have characters behave with pluck and virtue. I admire her more than ever; that fantasy of mine.
Weeks ago I’d promised to speak at a panel discussion honoring a great Italian woman writer who recently died, and dammit, I’d get there. I didn’t prepare any formal remarks but I knew the subject well. Words, as usual, would come to my aid. More important was what to wear.
Before rummaging through the closet, I switched on my friendly radio, which obliged with just the sort of diversion I craved. An Italian city official from Verona was being interviewed, through an interpreter, about the search for a woman to answer the many letters addressed to Juliet Capulet, since the person who for years had been answering Juliet’s mail was retiring. The dress fell from the hanger as I stood entranced. Letters came from all over the world asking Juliet’s advice on problemi di cuore, which the interpreter translated as “relationships.” Even with the meager Italian I’d picked up from Q., I could bet that problemi di cuore were not “relationships.” Verona needed a person who could write back with warmth and understanding. Well, this certainly qualified for the “nice work if you can get it” category. I’d gladly learn Italian. Q. could help with the finer points over the phone. But would I qualify otherwise, with my history, that is? In prompt response, the interviewer asked how come so many people seek Juliet’s advice, seeing that she did not fare so well in her own relationship? Evidently, replied the Italian through the interpreter, the letter writers feel that despite if not because of that fact, Juliet would be sympathetic to their problemi.
It was painful to tear myself away from this discussion, but I managed to get downstairs, waved to Luke reading his paper in the calm of early evening—he gave a suave approving nod at my efforts to dress for the occasion—and climbed into a taxi.
The driver was Greek. Before long we found ourselves discussing the Greek origins of democracy (never mind the slaves and women, save the energy for the talk), as well as Socrates and his cohorts in the agora, the hemlock and so on. Very nice to sit back in an air-conditioned car, shielded from the horns and sirens, hearing almost firsthand about classical antiquity. Not at all a bad way to pass the time, though it soon appeared I might be spending the entire evening: the driver, notwithstanding his Attic wit and learning, couldn’t find a thread through the labyrinth of lower Manhattan and I wasn’t much help. Factor in the late rush-hour traffic and the trip took twice as long as it would have done by subway. We parted with genuine regret, and I went woozily through the auditorium toward the room behind the stage.
“Just in time, Laura,” the moderator greeted me, a rising young literary star with the aplomb of a talk-show host. “You can leave your bag here, the ladies’ room is back there if you want it, but hurry up because we’re going out there pronto.”
“Fine. Can I just sit down for a second?”
The others were pacing around, gossiping, glancing at their notes, adjusting their bra straps. I sank into a chair and a veil of gray descended over my eyes. Then the floor was rising to meet my face. I dropped my head down to my knees.
“Laura, are you okay? What is it? Stage fright?” It was Charlotte, a kindly older writer I’d shared a stage with twice before. She bent down and patted my shoulder.
“Nothing. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
“Why don’t you go and arrange chairs or something, Vicky, so they know we’re on our way. And someone bring Laura a glass of water.”
The faintness passed. I tried to sit up straight but hadn’t the energy to raise my head. My arms and legs were turning to sand again. “I don’t think I can do this, Charlotte.”
“Your face is pretty gray.” She waved the others off. “Here, drink this. Maybe you’re getting that flu that’s going around.”
I tried walking a few steps but it was no use. The couch across the room beckoned irresistibly and I fell onto it.
“Charlotte, come on,” the moderator called. “Laura, I’ll start and say you’re late. Come in when you’re ready. Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“No, don’t say I’m late. I can’t go out there. I’m sorry to do this to you—” I was so sleepy I could barely get out the words. The figures of the others, hovering, concerned, faded into a mist and I closed my eyes. Through the patchy film of sleep I heard intervals of applause as the panelists were introduced. So this is how it’s happening, I thought. With a drifting sigh, with a whimper.
After a while I got up and someone from backstage helped me outside and hailed a cab. A light rain was starting. This driver had no conversation but he maneuvered quickly through the slick, darkening streets, and when I next opened my eyes the car had stopped. Somehow I got to my door and made straight for the chair overlooking the river.
As darkness took hold and the rain got heavier, my body stiffened. The streets, the car, had been a shield. Now I was alone with it. I had failed. I was no good for anything. Useless. Finished. I couldn’t pretend to fight it, whatever the doctor called it. The virus could take on the shape of any emotion, and it became a virus of dread. As I was the illness, so I was the dread. The aches started in my shoulders, moving down the skeletal chain to invade every joint. Fear translated and made tangible. Like the Samurai warrior in the book, I had no friends. Could I make my mind my friend?
I sank deeper into the chair, imagining the future, the vibrations this very moment rolling my way. Evelyn. Mona’s mother lurked in my mind like a dream not yet dreamed. What could it be like, being Evelyn, gradually shedding everything but manners and habits of unknown origin? Soon even the songs would vanish. Maybe I should write down the facts of my life before I began to forget. So much sleep might obliterate memory, like a pillow pressed down on the brain. Jilly once told me about a conceptual artist who kept minute chronicles of every daily activity, from grocery shopping to chance encounters to making love, all painstakingly inscribed in color-coded charts and graphs. But her goal was to heighten awareness of daily life as a form of art, not to lasso memory.
I could envision myself years from now, not as lucky as Evelyn. No loyal daughter looking out for me. For all her affection, I doubted that Jilly would take it on. Too young. No, I’d be in a nursing home, a fairly decent one, let’s say. Let’s say I can talk almost rationally, I’m not a social disgrace. But I’m pastless. Forgotten the facts of my life, forgotten I was a writer, forgotten the books themselves, right now as unforgettable as my ears or skin. I do remember a few people who visit—Jilly, Joyce, Mona (not Tim, Tim is long gone)—though I’ve forgotten how their lives intersect with mine. I recognize them only from their visits. One day a visitor brings me my own books to cheer me, hoping perhaps to touch a nerve that might restore my life the way a second blow on the head restores to Ronald Colman in Random Harvest the life which the first blow on the head sent to oblivion.
The visitor arrives—most likely Joyce—toting a foot-high pile of books. For I’ve done what James Baldwin said is the writer’s task, steadily, methodically filled an empty shelf with books. The visitor brings books I haven’t even written yet: maybe a high-class thriller, and a comic novel set in the future, and the book which right now I find so intractable, the revised vision of Ev’s life that keeps him safely in his seaside town so he doesn’t end in a pool of blood on a Bronx street but grows old and hoary.
There are my books, handed to me one by one, and the pity is that I don’t recognize them as mine, not even with the name and the photos (of a youngish, fairly elegant, interesting if not quite beautiful woman). When I’m told they’re mine I don’t understand. Nonetheless in my better moments, alone in my austere little room, I read them. Not straight through—I haven’t the concentration for that—but passages here and there and .. . I like them. When the visitor—hopeful Joyce—returns, if I’m in one of my better moments, I say, Yes, I enjoyed the books but with certain reservations. I liked the part about the college years and the marriage, but why did she have to make the children die? That was cruel. Or, That was outrageous, about the adolescent seduced by the doctor. And presented so nonchalantly! And that seaside village: what was the author getting at, spinning quaint fantasies about the Moth Agent and the Shellfish Constable’s wife and the Surveyor of Lumber? Contrasting the peaceful town with the havoc of the city? What for? Everyone knows that already.
It’s clear that my mind, what’s left of it, has grown very ordinary. Or, rather, only the ordinary part remains; the radical imagination is gone. And I wonder why my visitor’s eyes fill with tears.
Maybe I even read this book, long ago completed and published though now it lies dauntingly before me, and I say, Well, I liked it all right but why did she dwell for so long on the scene with the pool, waiting for the pool to fill up (a scene not yet written, its exact place uncertain)? What was the point of that?
WHEN YOU’RE TRAPPED IN A ROOM WITH FEAR, when the fear is trapped in you, it seems a reasonable response to the world. Given the certainty of death, primordial mother of fear, and the mystery of how she will greet us, it’s a wonder we aren’t paralyzed all the time.
I felt a hunger to hear my parents’ voices, an infantile longing for them to rescue me, long distance. I reached for the phone, envisioning them in their sleekly landscaped Florida retirement community, which resembled a futuristic prison or orphanage outdoors, and indoors an unending airport lounge where they seemed content to wait out the remainder of their days, which might be many since they were barely seventy and in good health despite my father’s complaints.
“Hah,” he said on hearing my own complaints. “Everything they don’t understand they call a virus. Get a few good nights’ sleep, you’ll be all right.”
“Sleep is not my problem. I could sleep all day if I let myself.”
“Maybe you should get a job, then. Get out more. At least you’re not in pain. I’d take a virus any day over my arthritis. Listen to this. Our next-door neighbor here—he feels great, out on the golf course, plays cards every day, goes for a routine checkup and they find colon cancer. Bad, right? What everyone dreads. They take it out, a month later he’s back to normal and out on the course again. He hardly felt a thing. Meanwhile they keep telling me this damned arthritis won’t kill me, but I can’t do what I like to do, like go bowling or play golf.. . .”
“Golf? Since when have you played golf?”
“I never did, but now that I’m retired I might like to.”
“People seem to walk around golf courses very slowly. I bet you could manage it. Or ride in one of those carts.”
“I’d be afraid to swing the club. I could throw my back out and then where would I be? Besides, my vision is so poor, I don’t think I could see the ball. Listen, what you need is to get out of yourself a little. You’re still a young woman. You could marry again. You could even have a baby, it’s not too late. Nowadays lots of women do it at your age.”
“Is Mom around?”
“We just want you to be happy.”
“I know.”
“Laura?” My mother took over. “You’ve heard of Dr. Atkins on TV? Listen to him. He knows all about these kinds of things. Get a pencil, I’ll tell you when to watch. I watch him all the time.”
The rain had stopped as we spoke, but the night sky was overcast. I could barely distinguish the trees from the river or the sky. The only clear thing in the blackened windows was my own face, artificially lit, staring back as if from the other side of the glass. What was that look? Stony? Bewildered?
My father used to laugh affectionately when we drove through tunnels and I cried, Get me out of here! When I was very small I cried it in panic, then as time passed, with less panic, until it became a joke, a ritual performance. For he always did eventually get me out as promised. Now is different. I’m not in a scary, closed-in, seemingly endless place. That dark place is in me. Get here out of me! I want to cry to him.
It’s no performance, either. It takes discipline, yes, but unlike the projects Grace describes, it’s not a discipline I’ve chosen. The man who slept outside for a year wasn’t really homeless; he chose to behave as if he were. Though maybe he didn’t feel he had a choice, any more than I feel I chose the books I wrote, or am writing. They chose me for their translator and I had to stick by them every waking moment, as the interpreter sticks to the Tai Chi teacher.
The eyes in the dark window glinted unnaturally; the comers of the mouth turned sourly down. Bitter, fearful and confused, not a face I’d like to present in public. It came to me that this was a juncture—since my father was not going to rescue me—when life begged to be lived as an. That way, it could be tolerated.
Very well. For a start, I put a better face on the face trapped in the glass. We’ve all heard of the hunger artist. I could be the first fatigue artist. Give it my best shot.
Too bad my performance would never resemble the lone violinist’s I heard on the radio, or the soprano singing Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate: they draw you in to surround you with feeling, a transforming embrace. My performance, born from constraint not freedom, would be a smaller, less generous thing. The audience would witness it, but only I would feel it. If I did it badly, no one would ask for a refund. If I did it well, only I would appreciate the craft required.
“Relax the thumbs. The thumb is the grabber. In Tai Chi there is no grabbing. Only relaxing. Yielding.”
The teacher is chipper this afternoon. The hotter it gets, the more energetic he gets. He probably has some theory about the vibrations of heat drifting over the river stimulating the flow of the chi. For him, maybe. Not for the rest of us.
“Head erect, suspended from heaven.” He moves through the group like a fish gliding through water—another of his favorite images—adjusting our postures. Most people are in shorts, except for the two stockbrokers, their shirtsleeves rolled up and ties loosened. “No, no. No weight on the front foot in this posture. Never equal weight on the feet. No stasis in the universe. With the weight on one foot you’re always poised to move, in a state of readiness.”
Grace breaks from the agonizing posture we’ve been holding for several minutes to rub her calves. “Shit,” she mutters, “my legs are killing me.” Assiduously, the interpreter translates, and the teacher approaches her.
“Learn to take pain,” he says somewhat harshly, for him. He’s generally forbearing. “Tasting bitter, we call it. Get used to the bitter taste.” Chagrined, she resumes the posture. Her face isn’t relaxed—she looks as though she has something bitter in her mouth.
“No, don’t sit down,” the teacher says to a student moving toward a bench, the young Dominican who works in the pizzeria on Broadway. I’ve seen him twirling the dough with a look of serene mastery, very like the Tai Chi teacher’s look. “Never sit while doing the form. Relax, but don’t sit.”
His rounds finished, he returns to the front and allows us to rest. “Good, very good. Everyone’s tasting bitter. You’ll feel the pain less if you remember the rushing spring. Yes?”
We nod obediently.
“The energy from the earth bubbles up into the foot, the place just behind the ball of the foot, where you’re rooted. That’s why it’s called the rushing spring. Concentrate on that energy and your legs won’t hurt as much. Now for some push hands.”
He pairs everyone carefully, large with small, athletic with delicate, old timers with newcomers. What matters is not size or muscle but pliability, as well as a feel for the oncoming energy in the partner’s body. If you can get out of its way, become an elusive shadow or ghost, as the teacher calls it, your partner will stumble through his own momentum. Large with small so that neither will be tempted to use force—needless for the one, futile for the other. He pairs me with a big paunchy man called Marvin, who’s been studying for a year or so, not nearly as long as I. We’re not meant to be adversaries—we’re in this together, like dancing partners—but my malaise and crankiness get the better of me, and very quickly Marvin has me tripping around on the concrete.
“What’s going on, Laura?” The teacher comes over, the interpreter at his heels as always. “Why do you resist him?” He demonstrates with Marvin and catches him before he falls. Marvin is gracious about it, I must say, and for a large man he successfully avoids using the strength at his disposal, not that it would do any good. In real life Marvin manages a local video rental place, and when I drop in, we exchange a complicit glance and a few words if he has time. How’re you doing, I ask, and he answers, No complaints whatsoever.
“Continue,” the teacher commands. Again Marvin becomes a shadow and I totter through the vacated space.
“Don’t fight him, Laura, but stay with him. Adhere, follow his every move. Know what he’s going to do before he does it. Never resist, but persist.”
“This is just not my day, I guess.”
“What’s the matter?”
I answer with a shrug.
“Continue. Listen to his energy. Listen.”
But I stumble again.
“How can you listen,” the teacher says, “if you’re so busy thinking and doing? Stop trying to do. You think nothing will happen unless you do it?”
I shake my head and move off to sit on a bench. He leaves me alone but appears worried. Even the interpreter looks concerned—I’m usually an apt student. What will he suggest this time? Chicory?
After a while he calls through the interpreter to those of us who’ve left the field. “Come back. I have a story to tell you. I see you all think this is very hard, the push hands. Hard to yield, hard not to use strength, hard to stay balanced. It’s not hard if you do what I tell you. Do nothing. Let the other do it all. You think there’s some secret power but it’s no secret at all. Listen. Long ago, Lao-tzu, the Taoist master, and one of his disciples, Du Be, were walking with a student and they came to a river. Laotzu and Du Be stepped into the river and began walking across it, apparently walking on the water. Like your Jesus Christ, ha ha. When the student tried to follow them he found himself in deeper and deeper water. Lao-tzu, already on the other side, said to Du Be, ‘Maybe we should tell our student where the stones are.’ And now, thank you.”
The class is over, and as usual we rest on the benches nearby. Grace sits rubbing her legs.
“I’ve been wondering about your work,” I say. “Can you really make a living doing performance pieces?”
“Oh, no,” she says with a laugh. “Most of us have to do what’s called real work. I work for a women’s co-op gallery downtown, running the business end. It’s an okay job, but I could really use the time to develop new projects. It’s amazing how much preparation they take. My Take Back the Night costume took weeks.”
“What was that?”
“About three years ago I constructed this very chic outfit out of metal, a long dress with boots. It looked like a medieval suit of armor, and I wore it every time I went out at night or rode on the subway. When strangers asked me why, which of course they did, that was the whole idea, I explained it was to illustrate the feeling women have of being threatened in the city, sort of like a walking Expressionist painting. Right now I’m planning a dental show. I need some root canal work, and it occurred to me how a visit to the dentist’s office is a formal ritual everyone goes through periodically. This new dentist tells me the equipment they use in dental school nowadays is very different from the old—they’ve got high-powered drills that make an excruciating noise, and you can’t even buy the old kinds of chairs anymore. In the new chairs the patient lies down and the dentist sits. He’s unhappy about this—he likes to stand—and we should be, too, because it makes the patient more powerless, and you know how at the dentist’s office you’re powerless enough as it is. So I thought I might have a show of the new equipment in a gallery, like a trade show, and actually have my dental work done on it in public. My dentist says he’d be willing to perform in front of an audience. I might even ask members of the audience to volunteer to have their teeth fixed as part of the show. It’d certainly be cheaper. And people would become aware of the social and political aspects of the process.”
“What’s so funny, Laura?” It’s the Tai Chi teacher and the interpreter passing by.
“You should ask Grace. She’s a performance artist. She’s telling me about her work.”
“Go ahead and laugh. I don’t mind,” says Grace. “Lots of people laugh. Listen, I laugh myself sometimes. Our kind of art,” she tells the teacher, “what my friends and I do, is more of a process or a discipline than product-oriented.” She stops considerately for the interpreter but he nods to her to go on; he can translate large segments at once, though God knows what he makes of them. “We’re against the commercialization of art as a commodity to be shown in museums or sold in galleries. Our art is part of our lives, a way of life, political, social, personal. We don’t compartmentalize.”
This comes out rather shorter in Chinese than I would expect.
“In China in the old days, art was also not a career or even a profession but a way of life,” replies the teacher. “The artist expressed the harmony of the universe through the five excellences, painting, calligraphy, poetry, medicine, and of course, Tai Chi Chuan. He would never have dreamed of selling a painting or a sample of calligraphy. He gave it away as a token of regard.”
“Well,” says Grace, “then we’re part of a similar tradition. I’m not familiar with China. But the Western tradition goes way back. Diogenes, for example. Do you know about him?”
The Tai Chi teacher shakes his head.
“Diogenes was a Greek philosopher from the fifth century, B.C. The legend goes that he traveled around with a lantern in search of an honest man. But that’s not the half of it. He spent his whole life acting out his beliefs, making gestures we’d consider absurd. He pretended to be a beggar and begged from statues, he walked through the streets backwards, he glued shut the pages of a book. Once when he was invited to give a public lecture he got up on the platform and just stood there and laughed. In the same vein, I have a friend who walked around Soho barefoot when the women’s movement was in its heyday, with pots and pans hanging all over her body, to make a point. About women’s lives, you know?”
“Very interesting,” says the teacher after a pregnant pause. “But not exactly what I was thinking of. Chinese art did make beautiful things, poems, paintings, pottery, all of them with a great deal of empty space. The empty space represents the inner life, what is most important but unseen. Like the breath, which is invisible but sustains us. They say the ancient Tai Chi masters could live on air. Eat air, that is. Of course, I’m sure they preferred food, but in an emergency...” He smiles, but the interpreter doesn’t smile, just keeps translating, as if the teacher is his muse. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Who is whose muse here?
“The space in a bowl, for instance,” he goes on. “You use the clay to make it, and that is the part you see, but what makes the bowl useful is the space within. That metaphor is from Lao-tzu, to give proper credit.”
“Yes, well...” murmurs Grace. “Eating air. And here we’re always dieting. What is the cost of the classes, by the way? I’ve taken four now and haven’t even paid you yet. I assume you’re not giving them as a token of regard.”
“No, unfortunately, here we all have to earn a living. We cannot eat air all the time.”
They step aside to discuss her payment and I head home on sandbag legs, to work. But how can I get to work if I can barely get to my desk with the waiting pages about the idyllic town, rocked by the tides, where Ev grew up? I read over my pages in bed—the house, always the house:
“From the bedroom windows you can see the curving bay a half mile off, shimmering still waters where far out rest the blackened remains of a sunken ship, mast sticking up lonely against the sky. At low tide, when the bay is nothing but mud for a mile or more, parts of the hull are exposed, but at high tide only the mast and a few tips of wood or metal sway in the breeze. The easy way to the bay is to drive down the dirt road to the paved road that cuts through heathery fields and hushed, melancholy marshland, but a better way is to walk the narrow path through the woods, then through open brush tufted with blueberry bushes, gradually becoming sand dunes, and over the dunes to the beach itself, where clumps of black seaweed in orderly rows mark the reach of the tides.”
Even in the bed’s snug embrace I couldn’t grasp the images tight; they whisked through my head like blown dust. Blown by fear.
As I lay back against the pillows, the warm, faintly stale smell of bed—of me in bed—rose up in a little invisible cloud. If it had a color, it would be amber. A homey smell like old-fashioned cooking, roasting meats and sweet pies in farm kitchens, but not quite as fresh. The bed and I smelled slightly overcooked, not yet distasteful. Was it me or the virus, that smell? Or are we one and the same?
Outside, the coming night was cool and uncommonly quiet. I could see the moon rising, also amber, a few gray wisps like stray hairs across its placid, indifferent face. Even with the windows open, the smell gave the room an airless feeling. Better to smell of the red sand in my veins, clean and dry as a desert. Then came the stiffening that used to alarm me so at the beginning. I waited for the sensation to shudder its way along my limbs, and once it passed off, I began very slowly to move through the apartment like a newborn animal testing its legs.
The lights going on over in New Jersey shimmered on the river and silhouetted the trees. I checked the French door for the reflection of that rich, defiant tail, its hairs quivering in the imperceptible night breeze. Nothing there. This was my moment.
I fetched a paper bag and a knife to cut away the ivy, and put on the orange rubber gloves I had used for the rat’s nest that long-ago morning after Q. told me how much he’d missed me in China. I raised the screen, gathered up the damp clump of leaves and other debris bearing the contours of a recently occupied bed, perhaps as languorous and welcoming as my own, stuffed them in the bag, then gathered up stray leaves and twigs so as to leave a clear and, I hoped, uninviting space. I fastened the screen firmly but left the window open, for it was oppressively, deliciously hot. I thrust the bag into the kitchen garbage can, washed my gloved hands, then removed the gloves and washed again. I felt like a mortician, though I had not touched or seen the body. I was one of those women in old villages the world over who clean up the remains, while the mourners go about the streets. Then I took the elevator to the basement, where I deposited the bed in its final resting place.