Right. As though she went to work each day.
Actually, from mid-morning on, Nola did have a destination to reach. All roads lead to Bombay, don’t they, dear, Walter used to taunt her. May I top off your drink? More tonic or more gin?—let me guess. And when Walter wasn’t there, Win did the topping off. And took nips for himself.
7
A soft click overhead: the walk sign downshifting.
Ellen moved quickly across the intersection.
No dillydallying! Nola used to say that, propelling herself and her kids across the Green in Morristown. Amazing how she managed never to bob and weave. And rarely yelled. She was almost never nasty. A bit of a nag now and then, with Walter. Fifteen years in the closet with one’s not-yet-out husband would make anyone snappish, though, wouldn’t it? She’d lacked Walter’s rapier wit, couldn’t slice quick-quick then walk away.
Easy to say she should’ve been the one to leave. But how—an unskilled housewife with no scratch of her own? Walter would never have agreed to joint custody; she’d have been stuck with the kids in any case. At least he left her the house, plus enough money to live on. And funds for the offspring’s educations.
Urgent drum-roll: incoming train.
The sidewalk hissed softly in response, like a cymbal being brushed.
Somewhere there’s music, how near, how far . . .
It was crazy that Nola and Walter had ever met, let alone married. The meeting had happened in Cleveland, when Nola was twenty-two and jobless. One of those classic newspaper tales: her old music teacher had given her a ticket to one of Walter’s performances, and when it ended, Nola passed by the side entrance of Severance Hall just as il baritono was emerging from his dressing-room. A journalist snapped a photo of Walter Portinari and a young female fan, smiling at each other in surprise.
Walter’d been smitten, but by what? Probably by Nola’s body, so like a teenaged boy’s: lanky, lean-hipped. Not to mention her willingness to submit to his take-it-or-leave-it proposal. He’d needed a wife. He told her he’d move her to the house in Morristown, where she’d set up base-camp and create a stage-set for his life. It’d all work out fine as long as she didn’t ask questions about where he was going, what he was doing, or who he was seeing.
Had she given a thought to motherhood prior to meeting him? Apparently not. Yet the prospect hadn’t unnerved her. For herself as well as for Walter, the kids would be props for the stage-set. But then the gin took over, and Walter’s sexual proclivities were no longer overlookable. So when Nola started acting snippy on a regular basis, Walter leveled his verbal guns at her. You’ve got no money of your own. You’re a stay-at-home drunk. Make the kids do what they’re supposed to; I’ll handle everything else. And stay out of my study.
Cause of la mamma’s death? There was an official story—an unfortunate accident—and the untold one. Plus a question:
If, one day in your late fifties, after your husband’s dumped you to live with a man in Italy, and your kids have left home, and you’re living alone in a studio apartment, drinking your way through your days; if, one afternoon as you’re thinking my God, I’ll be sixty soon, you consume so much gin that you trip and hit your head on the edge of a chair and lose consciousness and lie on your back on the floor and don’t wake up again and are discovered almost a week later by the super of your building because your mail’s piled up and you’re not answering the doorbell—if you die after all this happens, then haven’t you truly drowned in Bombay, even if the stated cause of death is accidental blunt head trauma in New Jersey?
Tumbling Woman
1
A life-sized bronze statue went on display in the lower concourse of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan during the fall of 2002. Called “Tumbling Woman,” it depicted a naked woman “plunging from a Trade Center tower,” according to the newspaper.
Actually, the sculpture didn’t include a tower, or anything else but the woman’s body. But in an interview, the sculptor spoke of the fate of those who’d fallen or jumped from the Twin Towers a year earlier. Viewers could thus draw their own conclusions.
“Tumbling Woman” wasn’t on display for long; numerous protests resulted in its removal midway through its two-week run. Before taking it away, Rockefeller Center officials covered it with a cloth and hid it behind a screen.
The sculptor spoke about his creation shortly after he’d reluctantly permitted its eviction. “The thing is,” he said, “if you look at the piece itself, it feels like a dream in which somebody is floating. There’s no weight there . . . sending the crushing, rippling current back through the body as it hits a solid mass. It feels more like tumbleweed, even though it’s a massive sculpture. So somebody else looking at it might say, ‘God, it reminds me of falling in a dream right before I wake up.’”
2
To fall like that . . .
Blair blew on her hands to warm them.
Weightless as tumbleweed. To fall through life that way, bobbing carelessly through the air, would be ideal. People spoke about moving through life—moving steadily, evenly, as though life were a conveyor belt. But what really happened was falling. You were born and you started falling, and you fell and fell til you hit bottom, which was death. You could fall in all kinds of ways—slowly or quickly, smoothly or roughly; it was partly up to you, partly up to your luck. In any case you had to try to make yourself light. To strip away things other people thought of as necessities. To be loved and admired, to be paid attention, those weren’t necessities. Seeking what is true, Camus said, is not seeking what is desirable. Choice was the only real necessity: the ability to choose how to fall through your life. Like a tumbleweed.
People referred to her as if she were a girl. But that didn’t matter. Her choice had always been to ignore labels. To be invisible, as a boy, as herself. Keith knew. That was enough.
She swept her hands lightly over the parapet.
It was surfaced in concrete, neither too fine nor too rough. Rubbing it wasn’t like rubbing slate or granite. Every material required its own special type of frottage. It took time to learn the right way to press and rub. Too hard and the paper would rip; too lightly and no clear details could be captured.
She lay a piece of butcher paper on the top of the parapet and worked the charcoal evenly across it, keeping the pressure uniform. Soon its surface looked like roughly napped suede. She measured one of the parapet’s regularly spaced apertures: eighteen inches wide, fourteen high. Using a thin sheet of cardboard, she made a tracing of its clover-shaped perimeter, cut it out, and lay it between two sturdier sheets. At home she’d make a stencil by stretching lightweight mesh across a square plywood frame and fixing the cutout to the center of the mesh. A long wooden handle would complete it. The frame would look like a square tennis racket with a paper clover in its middle.
The mesh would have to be built up. She’d sprinkle dirt and gravel across it, apply a fixative, let it dry, and test it. If all went well, the paint sprayed through the mesh would deliver a texture visually similar to that of the parapet’s surface.
Getting the texture right would be the tricky part. After all that she’d be ready, armed with a template and a tray of magnetized block letters. And the same red paint she’d used for the C-notes—her trademark color.
3
Had there ever been a time when the parents had accepted Keith as he was? If there had been, she couldn’t recall it. They’d always objected to him. He violated some rule simply by being himself.
It was a good thing they didn’t know he’d shown her how to be a boy. They probably would’ve kicked Keith out of the house—and considered her a bad seed, too. As it was, she was overlookable. They’d prattled on about getting good grades, getting ahead, as if it were indisputable that she’d want a life just like theirs. And what was theirs but a prison? And now each of them was married again, to money-grubbers like themselves.
They weren’t worth thinking about.
There is no such thing as great su
ffering, great regret, great memory, said Camus. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. Keith had his own way. You and I are animals too, he said that first time they did it. But don’t talk about it. No one will get it. You’re my pup, he said—not my bitch but my pup. I’m showing you how pups do it.
She rolled up the butcher paper and put it in her knapsack.
Pick Seven
1
Didn’t you say you’re working in a print shop, El? So why do I hear honking?
She sidestepped a trash can. Nearby, a garbage truck stood double-parked; traffic was backing up as horns blared.
I’m on the street, Win, I’m heading to work. It’s the garbage truck you’re hearing.
So that’s the growling sound. You’re late, right?
Yup.
Remind me again where this print shop is?
It’s a printing department. In the Brooklyn Museum.
Ah, yes. Are the offices swanky?
They’re in the basement, actually. Tell me what’s up. Are you composing anything new?
Are you?
Don’t bait me.
Just wondering when you’ll go back to doing your thing. Poems, I mean.
2
They wouldn’t get into it now; not over the phone, anyway.
Over drinks, eventually. Easy to visualize the scene: they’d meet at a bar, and Win would down several vodkas in a row while she nursed a beer. If she inquired nonchalantly enough, he might hum something for her. Perhaps a few measures of a counterpoint for one of the preludes he’d composed, shortly before Melody left for Spain. Beautiful, those preludes—prickly yet tender. Several had been recorded a few years back. The string quartet had wanted to record the counterparts as well, but there was a problem: the counterparts weren’t actually written, because Win had stopped scoring. He no longer wanted people to read his scores. He wanted them to see the music instead, then recompose it, in their own heads. How were musicians gonna do that? By using the nonrepresentational sketches he was doing now. Each one was roughly the size of a normal score, but with nothing recognizable from any system of notation. Which wasn’t a problem, Win claimed. If the players looked at his sketches closely enough, they’d be able to hear his counterpoints. They wouldn’t need any notation.
So let’s get this straight: seeing’s a kind of hearing, and hearing’s a way of seeing. Composition is recomposition, with the listener (the viewer, that is), not the composer, carrying the ball over the finish line. Welcome to Win’s world.
Of course it’d all made little sense to the musicians and musical directors Win had worked with before Madrid. What could they do but turn away in frustration?
Hence no commissions since Mel’s death.
For over two years he’d been digging himself into an ever deeper hole. He’d written almost no arrangements or advertising jingles like he used to do. And word had traveled: Win Portinari was doing wacky experiments in notation, so-called drawn music. Silly shenanigans, especially for a composer who’d already established a name for himself.
Good grief, Win. No, bad grief. A take-no-prisoners kind of grief.
El? You still there?
Yep.
So tell me, how are the work conditions at the museum?
Crappy wages. But I have free rein with my schedule, more or less.
He snorted softly.
And you’re doing what, exactly?
What I always do—editing copy, proofing copy . . . right now I’m working on the text for some exhibition tiles, plus a few wall treatments. Illustrated didactics, they’re called.
Who knew you could perform such tricks?
And you, what are you doing?
Right now? Listening to my tinnitus.
Your what?
Tinnitus. The sounds inside my head.
Like, when your ears ring? I didn’t know you had that. How’d you get it?
Dunno. Nobody knows what causes it. It can come and go, or it can be there all the time. In my case it’s constant.
But why? There must be some cause.
Silence for a moment, as if the call’d been dropped.
Win? Can you hear me?
Yep.
So is there really no cause for tinnitus?
Sometimes it’s brought on by loud noises, or by stress. Sometimes it just happens. No one can say for sure.
Have you seen a doctor?
Nope. I’ve read up on it, there’s nothing to be done. It’s not a disease, it’s a condition. You live with it. With me, it started after . . . anyway, I wear headphones to block out other sounds; that way, I can focus on the tinnitus. I’ve started sketching it.
Jesus . . . but isn’t it just one sound, like a whistling?
Actually, no. It varies in pitch and volume, even in rhythm. I hear two layers of sound. There’s a background whoosh, kind of like the sound of traffic. And then there are a couple of lines in the foreground, one sustained, the other choppy; their distance varies. The thing about tinnitus is, at first everything seems to be happening on just one plane, and then you realize it’s totally three-dimensional.
He paused. Was winding down, would sign off in a moment. Had to be snared now, or he’d slip away.
Let’s make a date, okay, Win? Hang out together for a few hours?
Ice cubes dropping into a glass. That tinkling noise—did he hear it as the bubbling of a creek? Or did it bang on the insides of his head, like sound waves of an explosion boomeranging between Madrid and New York?
I’m no different, El.
Different? In what sense?
From the way I’ve been. So there’s not much point in our getting together.
Listen, you can’t keep going like this, staying alone all the time, turning down work . . .
We’ll talk in a bit, okay? Gotta go. You too, eh?—you’ve got your freelance gig. Take care.
3
What dumb game was Win playing? Drawn music, recomposition—escapist tricks.
The seat of happiness, would Win ever get to sit in it? Happiness’s hassock. Not a footstool or ottoman, and not at all leathery . . . A swing-seat, suspended by a brace of unsnappable cords reaching up to the clouds—a swing-seat upholstered in blue-and-white ticking, with downy cushions and plush velvet armrests.
The sort of seat a canny dog would make his own.
What would it feel like, sitting there? You’d close your eyes and settle in, locomoted by a steady breeze, the ceaseless air of here and now; and as the seat swayed, you’d accept everything—uncertainty, terror, shame, loss, the whole existential kit—and your mind would expand languidly as the gas of rien, invisible and odorless, filled it; and best of all, you’d no longer be thinking! You’d have slipped the Cartesian noose and entered a state of . . . what, exactly?
Splendid guilt-free carelessness.
Once you were in that seat, there’d be no more warbling of songs about failure, no sleep-banishing mantras—did I say something wrong, do something foolish, miss some boat? No fear of irrelevance, life thinning out. Just easy swaying, all the day long.
But there was a hitch. You couldn’t simply be hoisted into the seat; you’d have to clamber up there by yourself. En route, you’d take wrong turns and backslide down tricky slopes. That wasn’t all. If you spoke openly about wanting to reach this perch, you’d seem on a fool’s mission—since as everyone knew (though nobody liked to admit it), the seat of happiness had an eject button, which sooner or later its occupant was bound (accidentally-on-purpose?) to push. Thus getting there was only part of the challenge. The other, harder part: staying put.
So you just had to hope you’d arrive somehow, occupy the seat, and not blow it. Because this wasn’t the kind of thing you could do over and over. You wouldn’t have endless shots at it. You’d be lucky to get just one.
4
Coffee at long last, after sweaty backtracking . . . there it was, across the street—on the corner of Sixth Avenue.
&nb
sp; Monday through Friday, the best brew in the Slope could be found in a dumpy bodega. Slope Shop was the name printed crookedly across the bodega’s front window; inside, a ceiling fan whirred in all seasons. By the cash register lay a tiny ancient dog that slept all the time, grunting as it dreamt. And in the air was the scent of really, truly good joe. None of that overpriced yuppie shit.
Merchandise? Shelves of this and that, mainly useless junk. Dust bunnies in all the corners. Expiration dates long past. Throughout, a sense of pleasantest sloth.
What was it, the smell of the interior of the Slope Shop? Apart from coffee, of course. Some childhood scent, ineffable.
Yes: behind the Morristown house, in a far corner of the back yard, the scent of a circle of earth beneath a droopy pine tree. On summer evenings the two of them would slide under the pine’s lowest branches, crawl inward, and sit cross-legged at the base of the trunk. If Walter wasn’t around, they’d wait out the half-hour during which Nola would try summoning them to supper. Once she’d given up, they’d stay a bit longer so Win could use pinecones to scratch little designs in the soot. Signals to enemies, he called them. Little notes of warning.
He’d whistle as he scratched. Recomposing, maybe? Once he got bored, he’d hum an all’s-clear and they’d crawl out, slip into the kitchen, and eat supper, now cold, by themselves. Then clear the table. Then wash the day’s dishes. Then go to their bedrooms—Win to compose, herself to commune with Clef, whisper a poem to him.
5
Jaywalking across Sixth Avenue, Ellen opened the bodega’s brass-handled door.
Ah, that scent . . . With an overlay of freshest coffee.
The proprietor, a short, oval-faced man, raised both hands in greeting. The dog by the register raised its head for a moment, then dropped back to sleep.
Buy Me Love Page 4
