War in a Beautiful Country

by Patricia Ryan

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was one more delusion ordinary people lived under, that once in jail a person could no longer hurt you.

  In one way or another.

  It was not unheard of that in some prisons the guards were so lax they lost cell block keys; that in some prisons drugs were on the radar screen, but smuggling out sperm was not; that in some prisons there was so much overtime the guards couldn’t keep their eyes open; in some prisons the personnel were using their PCs to watch porn instead of inmates; and in all prisons the record-high population made it nearly impossible, even with the very best of intentions, to keep up with everything going on inside.

  No wonder he could get the letters out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  i.

  Dear Regina,

  GOD SAYS BOOM AND HE DON’T MEAN THUNDER.

  Love.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Seated on a small bench beneath one of the few windows on the dark painting side of Regina’s loft, Detective Angela Vega was putting on lipstick without a mirror and she got it on her two front teeth. Her black jacket was full of cat hairs and a few stains. Regina noticed that throughout the morning Det. Vega left a used, rolled up tissue wherever she had been, just as Hansel and Gretel left crumbs to find the way home.

  After swiveling the lipstick back into its case like a retractable penis, Det. Angela Vega laughed and then boomed : “Ever notice that it’s the guy who can’t get it up who’s the first one to criticize your clothes, your hair, your cooking,...your weight...?”

  Angela Vega’s laugh resembled cracking ice, and it occasionally interrupted her strong speech, which did not start slowly and then build in volume, but instead began with the immediate loud gush of a faucet turned on at full force--SWOOSH! all at once--so that the listener had a desire to back up from fear of being splashed by words.

  Without pause, Det. Vega immediately skipped to: “I know how much these notes must frighten you. I understand they are very scary, but a little stupid--no, they’re silly--I can hear the guy chuckling now--’God Says Boom And He Don’t Mean Thunder’--boy, that’s a good one. A good one because it’s so bad. I think your saving grace in all this is that these notes are so--as you said--’corny.’ I’ve never heard of a serious bomber that was corny. They’re too nuts to be corny.”

  Det. Vega--”call me Angela” –had arrived at the loft at 10 a.m., three days after

  Regina called Det. Walker about the new note, and two months after the first one.

  “Well, at least this guy’s not in a hurry,” Det. Walker had said. “I’ll send someone when I can.”

  Regina was surprised to see Angela. She automatically expected a man.

  Without even saying hello, Detective Vega pronounced: “You expected a man, right? You’d think with all the progress we’ve made, and all us lady cops on the force and on t.v., it wouldn’t still happen. It happens all the time. And then after people catch themselves, they recover by asking me about my job and how come I’m a cop. I tell them I used to fantasize about being a hat check girl, like in the old 1940’s movies, at some sleazy nightclub where all the sweet-talking, big–tipping gangsters went. Then I realized the false power I would get from being treated kindly by cruel men could not be a lifestyle. So I thought being a cop was a good compromise. That and a conversation I once had with this guy: I asked him if he ever thought he would like to be a woman….you know, the way women sometimes wish they could see what it feels like to be a man, …. and he became aghast and said: ‘I would no more want to be a woman than I would want to be a dog.’

  ‘I beg your PARDON!….,’ I said.

  He said, ‘Why would I want to be someone at least half the world is stronger than?’

  I took his point.” She patted her gun, “I decided to be ‘stronger than’..…

  But it’s ok if at first you were surprised. We all still have our little prejudices about the gender thing.

  Just between you and me, even though I don’t want to, I myself can’t help having a small secret joy when I hear a woman has committed murder. But, of course, I never feel that way when a man does.

  It’s true women are allowed to be astronauts, but they are hard to find as game show hosts.

  Listen, when men want to be buffoons, they still dress up like women and for insults they call each other ‘ladies.’ I believe true equality will arrive only when you tell a man he throws like a girl and he says ‘thank you’.”

  Angela rolled up another used tissue and left it on the windowsill as she got up to look more closely at the painting Regina had been working on.

  “This is interesting,” Angela said. “I’m not sure what it is, but at least it doesn’t have people in it. Having people in pictures, especially of nature, can ruin a beautiful scene for me. I can’t help thinking ‘I wish these people were not spoiling those wonderful views.’ So how’s the painting life? It can’t be too good.”

  Regina did not want to tell Angela about the painting life. To Regina it was a serious, almost religious subject, fraught with spiritual, social, and economic problems. Unless you were a painter yourself, such a conversation could make people’s eyes glaze over.

  Regina believed Angela was just using this mock interest to find out other things about her...things which Regina would gladly tell her directly. But most of all, she was afraid that Det. Vega would not let her finish a sentence about painting or anything else. She hadn’t all morning.

  “What are the police doing about these notes, about my life being in danger!”

  “Your life’s not in danger, sweetie. Besides, what can the police do? Where was the first one from? Texas? This one is from Vermont. We can inquire from both states if they have any bombers on the loose, and that’s about it....especially since there has been no evidence of harm.”

  “Are you waiting until I get blown up?”

  Angela laughed, cracking ice again.

  “Don’t worry. These aren’t really bomb threats. What they are...is..well, these days we all can do anything we want, so what can someone do if he feels the need to break a taboo that isn’t there anymore? It used to be Sex. Gone. It used to be anything about Communists. Gone. There is nothing left to shock, hell, not even anything left to use as blackmail…not unwed mothers, abortion, adoption, illegitimacy, infidelity in high places, homosexuality, transvestitism, corruption, old enemies, new friends…..the only truly scary things left are child pornography, incest, and identity theft.

  I’m not saying letter bombings don’t happen. They happen all the time. But not from two corny notes, two months apart, from two different states.”

  Regina was surprised to hear Angela sigh.

  “How strange we are…fleeing from all the harm that faced ancient man in the natural world, and then rushing to form societies so we could huddle with each other, the most treacherous element on earth. And to think scientists are looking for our own kind on other planets. As if nature would make the same mistake twice.”

  ii

  The following week a random bomb, delivered by mail, killed a woman in Brooklyn, one more victim in a series of Brooklyn letter-bombs over the past couple of years. In addition, pipe bombs were blowing up in mailboxes all over the mid-west.

  Det. Angela Vega showed up at Regina’s loft without being called, and this time she made a mostly futile effort to sometimes let Regina talk.

  “I can’t think of anyone who would want to kill me. I’m not mad at anyone, or anyone at me,” Regina said.

  “As far as you know.... let’s start with our best bet: your nearest and dearest. What about your husband?”

  The mental picture of Marius could still flood Regina with warmth.

  “I’m divorced,” Regina said.

  “Ah, ha! We can explore that.”

  “No, that’s impossible!”

  “So you say. OK, we’ll get back to that later. Next chief culprit, a boyfriend?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?....He marri
ed?”

  “No. No.”

  “That’s good. Men marry so they can get a lot of sex without having to be nice to anyone….”

  “...I don’t think that’s exactly…..” Regina tried to respond.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Angela continued, “I love sex. Especially first times. It’s like traveling.”

  “That’s nice,” Regina said vaguely , not in the mood to discuss anything other than how she could be protected from the threats against her life.

  Pushing her point , Det. Vega punched in: “A man who once wanted to give you everything, take care of you with his life, will let you fall off a cliff, or worse, when he is no longer sleeping with you….which brings us back to your ex-husband….”

  “I already told you my husband has nothing to do with this.”

  From experience, Angela knew most women were in denial about how much a loved one loved them. Or not.

  “You think it can’t be your husband? The one who divorced you…..”

  Regina’s back stiffened: “It was mutual, detective…”

  “Ok,” Angela eased up.

  But then continued, “All I’m saying is that even a happy marriage can require a lifetime of misery. Look, it’s not just my opinion. The government’s definition of durable goods is only three years. And in a divorce …as you must well know… you get the privilege of watching the one person you would go to for his generous feelings towards you, turn sour on you. Oh, he may continue to love you; he just won’t like you anymore. Listen, I understand it is easy to get tired of someone you love. Hell, I get tired of myself….

  Besides who am I to talk? I left my first husband when I got bored. Well, I was young….”

  When Angela talked, her eyes seemed to roll in her head like a blind person’s, seeking to read what was on her mind from some imaginary screen inside her forehead, channel-surfing her own brain. She was often strangely remote from her listener, as if the conversation were only with herself and she would have it, whether you were there or not.

  “Face it, marriage never solves the existential problems…. Besides, I know too much about men who are married to ever want another one of my own. What for? For security? No way! If we don’t earn our own money, we’re always in danger of having to ask our husbands to buy our pantyhose. For sex? Ha! Men don’t make love as well as they think they do. I wish men knew more about each other: that some have enough lint in their bellybuttons to create a pet; that others have sperm like tapioca pudding.”

  “Oh, please, detective…..”

  “No,” Mrs. Parker, I realize that you, like everyone, had great hopes, but by now you must know that we can’t rule out your ex-husband. You may have to face the fact that the price for marriage is often too high…well, not so much that the price is too high: it’s that the rewards are too small.”

  Regina thought about her own favorite metaphor about the high price for small rewards...the time Marius decided that he wanted to have his own apple orchard on a small plot of land his family owned. After cultivating the soil, planting the trees, and waiting over a year, he was triumphant with the few puny apples that were produced. When all was calculated, he realized each apple cost him $400. Regina often thought her marriage had been a $400 apple. But she didn’t tell Angela any of this.

  “So,” Angela said, finally getting back to business and breaking into another of Regina’s reveries, a state which was becoming all too natural for her lately, “what’s this ‘sort of ‘ business with the boyfriend?”

  Regina said: “I like him. I just don’t love him.”

  “Could this ‘sort of’ boyfriend be mad that you don’t love him?”

  “Drew?! He’s thrilled that I don’t love him.”

  iii.

  Detective Angela Vega had opinions about everything and loved every one of them.

  Her daily conversations could jack-hammer listeners into near unconsciousness and disturb them with their bitterness.

  But she would always fall back on the idea that the cantankerous aspects of her unwelcome speeches were an occupational hazard.

  After years of watching what people do, she was always surprised that scientists pushed the idea that humans were intelligent and adaptable. She thought: it’s not entirely true; we are poorly equipped for life. We really don’t know how to be in it well. She had come to believe that life as we know it was not the natural element of humans; that while we believed we were designed to be conquerors of the earth and soon the cosmos, the truth was, our bodies could not withstand even the easy laws of nature and our brains struggled with the simplest logic.

  Some questions seemed just too big for humans to handle. But the one question we seemed to figure out was how to bring about our own demise and of all that around us.

  No wonder we don’t like it here, if you can go by all the unhappy people.

  Ancient liturgies call life, “a valley of tears.”

  Angela preferred to think of it as war in a beautiful country.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Regina struggled to paint light as only a squinting eye could see it.

  She wanted to paint refracted light, the multiple repetitions of color, all the snakes of streaked light that fast speed photography at night could do. But more, she wanted to capture light even a camera could not. Instead, she wanted only what the half closed eye could really see: light in streams, liquid light falling like rain in a puddle, fractured, dispersed, spread out. Light breaking down instead of building up.

  But Regina couldn’t quite do it.

  She found that once the paint was down, it was no longer light itself, but only color.

  To make matters worse, she was compelled to paint just one theme--a theme not much called for-- of the light made by an orchestra on stage in a concert hall.

  From above.

  All fuzzy dabs and lines of the black and white evening clothes, of the musical scores, the various spots of flesh tones in faces, the rainbow of hair colors seen from afar, the light always bright from the top, the orchestra and instruments held in a Cup of Frissoned Light.

  Light as a gleaming line reflected from the brass, reflected the way the sun on the French hunting horns used to scare the horses. Reflected from eyeglasses, bald heads, violins, walls, floors.

  Regina didn’t want to paint an orchestra. No. Just the light from one that was captured in a jar and then shaken out like salt to produce only what the unfocused eye could see.

  But she couldn’t quite get it.

  And she made things even harder for herself because if she ever did get it right, she wanted the scope and depth and truth and newness of the work to make people say “oh, my god!”

  She wanted them to stagger under the weight of her talent as she so often did when she suddenly came upon the real thing in others.

  She wanted them to get a giddy, frightened sensation, as if they were being abducted into some alien space craft, so startling and powerful would be the experience of seeing her work. She wanted someone to write her a letter saying, “I thought your painting would kill me.”

  But she couldn’t quite get it.

  So she was humbled personally, and artistically she was doomed

  ii.

  Instead of breaking new ground, doing visionary work, work that had never been done before, art for the new millennium, there was too much of yesterday in Regina’s work.

  She couldn’t help it. It was all she knew.

  But she was willing to learn. She tried several of the new forms, with computers and multi-media, but it all felt artificial. She regretted that her soul couldn’t grasp the magic of art through technology, and she knew it could be her soul’s fault.

  She tried the random art of cyberspace, of fractals and endless repeating patterns without human interference. Certainly there was a beauty in randomness, just look at the Cosmos. But, she thought, even in science the new gets old fast.

  In any case, even if randomness can make it beautiful, only intent can make it
art. Wasn’t it art’s job to organize the chaos of life, of the universe? In Regina’s view, what made the capricious results of technology irrelevant, was that they represented no intentional shaping of what comes out of human unconsciousness—no wrestling to the ground the over-muscled boa constrictor of creativity.

  These explorations made her a double failure. She failed to get results in either the old forms or the new. In the ultimate paradox, because she could not paint the future in the present, she would not go down in what would become the past: history.

  “But you do your best,” Marius would tell her when she would moan and complain.

  “That’s what everybody says,” Regina answered, “but nobody ever does their best in anything.”

  “Well, everything can’t be improved constantly,” Marius pointed out, “It already takes an enormous amount of effort and ability just to do something…..fairly good.”

  Regina hated this.

  “Fairly good? You mean mediocre. Just good enough to keep me in mediocre purgatory… bound to the work simply because it is not really bad.”

  “You know,” Marius said, “You have a good flair for design; maybe you could go into the mail order art business. I’ve always loved the mail order business…you can work from home….no overhead…..no inventory…..everything is profit…..”

  Regina shot him one of her “…don’t…” looks.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “everyone in the world is scrambling to get their own story told with no one to listen . So what can you expect? Maybe there is already too much art …..”

  Yes, Regina thought, everybody’s a goddamn painter. You can’t even get to the wine bar at any gallery show full of real painters, more painters, some painters, and wannabe painters.

  She used to crave being in a room filled with other artists. Then suddenly she couldn’t stand it.

  So many different visions, the high-pitched crescendo of other people’s talent shattered her and made her dizzy and nearly ill. “Beauty is the beginning of a terror we can barely endure,” the poet said. She became overwhelmed and frightened by the good painters, afraid they would leave no room for her. Yet the bad painters embarrassed her: “Am I like that!?”

  Marius said, “Don’t worry about it. If you are not this century’s greatest painter, nothing bad will happen.”