3.
The first fact that left me, as far as I can recall, was the existence of my keys. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t find them. One afternoon, suddenly, it was as though they’d never existed at all. It was scorching already, the rite of southern spring, and the mosquitoes had laid waste to my calves. As I stood there at my front door on my pockmarked legs, struggling with the doorknob, I thought someone was playing a cruel joke on me. I understood that the door was locked, but not how to undo the state of it being so. I felt like the dreamer whose mouth won’t sound though she is screaming.
Finally, I thought to go around to the garden and call for Elijah. I was screaming for his assistance when Ethel appeared. I hardly recognized her—her hair was nearly all white.
“What are you goin’ on about?” she asked. I explained to her that I could not get into the house, that the door was standing in my way.
“Where is Elijah?” I demanded again.
“My Elijah?” Ethel was frightened, as if I’d pointed to some specter in our midst. Then the fear passed and a curious expression formed on her face.
“Well, what’s taking him so long?” I asked.
Ignoring me, she pulled a large chain of keys out from the pocket of her dress and walked me like her darling through the front door. “You forgetting things again?” she asked. “Go on and sell my soul to Satan if my own Elijah was resurrected for your eyes to behold before my own.”
Outside I hear sirens. The oaks do not mind the interruption. Only we humans are given pause by the reminder of death. Perhaps everyone on the island is dying. It is happening to all of us, all at once, the planet over. The rain finally begins. The morning review of my facts disintegrates beneath the ambulance’s wailing soundtrack. I hope there is a little room somewhere in the universe where all the lost bits have gone to hide. “Second star to the left and straight on till morning,” I say aloud for nobody.
The wall calendar says it is Sunday, and on Sundays, for as long as we have lived here, Simon attends the Baptist church on the north end of the island. There he plays piano for the congregants, most of whom are or have been his employees. And on Saturday evenings, for as long as we have lived here, I have played for him the part of the church chorus as he rehearses the list of songs he plans to play the next morning. That is, until just days ago, when suddenly I could no longer stand the cacophony of what had always been melodious music to me. In fact, all I could hear in it were sirens. I screamed at Simon to Stop, please—it’s torture. He stood and closed the fallboard with little ceremony, then kissed me on the forehead. “As you wish, Elle.”
I rather wish he trembled with rage instead. But that has never been his way. It was never for me that Simon reserved his passion. Throughout his years of secret dalliances, there was only one I believe he loved, and that was the gentleman from Louisiana. We have never said anything about the lovers, nor about the geologist from New Orleans. I have always protected Simon, and he has always protected me. When I was young, I believed I was saving my life by marrying him. But one never knows how a life may be saved or destroyed until it is too late.
So we both had lovers who were originally from New Orleans. But unlike Simon’s, my affair has primarily been with a dead man.
I have only the one photograph of Gabriel and me. There is so little proof he ever existed before or after that day. My body, in the photo, has turned blond from the summer. Our knees just barely touch, but I can still feel the hair on my thighs stand at the gesture. He hands me his cigarette and I can taste him on it. I have never before wanted anything so much. The smoke wanders in and out of me. And then I collapse, coughing.
As the camera shutter clicks, he whispers a secret in my ear. The cigarette remains in my hand; his mouth is pressed against my hair. Desire is hardly the word. There is nothing else, in that moment, for us. I don’t remember where we were, who was taking the photograph, only that we’d just recently met. I was still a girl, barely seventeen. Time began its advance with Gabriel. Memories of the time before him belong to some other child’s life.
Gabriel’s punishment for me has been that he will always remain young, always the face in the photograph, while I’ve watched my body age. He is forever the man whose legs were entwined with mine that summer, who carried me out into the sea at Coney Island despite my shrieks that I couldn’t swim, whose weight later pressed down on that body of mine, now long gone. It was beneath him that I first felt what it was to melt the edges of myself into another. I wonder if he had a sense then, in the picture, that he would die so young. I wonder what his secret was, stilled forever in my ear by the camera, that I will never hear again.
Like the sirens before, the shrill ring of the telephone shatters my daydream. There is so much more noise in the world now than there once was. Simon announces that no one on the island has died. A kitten climbed up a tree and the ambulance—Lyra has only the one—came to rescue it. “Thank God, right?” he says into the phone.
“So, we all aren’t dying?” I ask him quite seriously.
“Would you like anything from town, darling?” Simon asks, ignoring me.
A time machine, I want to say. My own cat, Mina, stares at me curiously, as if I were engaged in a conversation with ghosts by using the telephone. I shoo her away but she returns to my side. Before I became sick, she never paid me any attention at all. The mice and the raccoons in the garden were far more interesting. Lately, though, I have become a subject of great curiosity to her. Ever since I realized that Mina will remember me longer than I her, I have an irrational resentment toward her. I hate that she will roam among my things, my purses and coats and blouses, free to destroy them once their occupant is gone. “Your friend is okay!” I shout at her, referring to the reckless kitten of Simon’s phone call.
Beholding the cat, I suddenly ache from the simple fact of her pretty face. If life weren’t full of so much beauty—the sweet mischief in Mina’s gaze, wild horses running down the blue beaches of everywhere, a spell of spring rain, the lilac dawn and its twin in dusk, the silk of a first kiss, Gabriel’s knee grazing mine, the stupidity and ephemerality and naïve violence of youth, of want, and children laughing, skipping beneath the curtain call of this world—then we wouldn’t cling to life so. There would be no use for memory. We would rise to eat, lie in the sun, then sleep again until it was all over. It’s beauty that has grown our minds. And it is beauty that has undone us. For a long time, I have wondered whether it would exist without the end, without death. If beauty and death are coincident, codependent. I still wonder now.