The following spring, he built the gazebo and granite fountain. He filled the car with stones from the Genesee River. He cut and pruned. Later, he added on the sunroom and restored the fireplaces.
“How do you know all this?” she wondered.
“I was an Eagle Scout,” he replied. He spread his lips into a sort of smile. When he laughed, it was curiously without sound. He produced a sort of translation from where he really lived. It was distorted by distance and impossibilities and his face stalled in a ghastly mime, as if he had palsy.
Patricia had three brothers but she was the one they called professor. Adjunct as it turned out, despite Malcolm’s efforts. Adjunct. Without the office or letterhead, prestige or pension.
They could have retired to Florida. Malcolm had almost agreed. There was a moment, a window they call it now, and then the window closed. The door shut. The entire room was erased.
It was after the unfortunate business with Bob Lieberman and his sordid divorce. Then his lurid remarriage in the disco lounge of Flint & Bow Indian casino.
“How did he meet her?” Malcolm was driving home.
“She was a server in the cafeteria,” Patricia said.
“They bonded over Jell-O?” he asked.
Patricia looked at him.“What do you really think?”
Malcolm didn’t hesitate. “He should commit seppuku.”
Malcolm doesn’t realize that personal catastrophes strike the distinguished and the negligible. Honor is not a factor. Some devastations aren’t reported on the evening news. That’s why she avoids headlines. What’s important are the back pages, the obituaries in small print and the corrections in pale gray.
Celestial aberrations can assault you as you bend to adjust a lamp. Uncharted comets leave trails of dust like shed feathers. Some phenomena can’t be described on a chalkboard. Conventional symbols are inadequate. They’re not like the fundamental significance of triangles or how to manufacture machine guns. Everyone comprehends the principles of the obvious.
In Allegheny Hills, it’s said things come easily to Professor McCarty. His first interview provided an immediate position. Provost Kruger, with his chapped lips and shredding in pieces like tiny fish scales, was making what would be his final appointment.
“I want you to stay,” the Provost revealed. “It’s personal.”
“Well, of course I’ll stay,” Malcolm replied. It was an unusually warm May. Maples budded on hills in patterns of red nubs like fallen constellations. It was a forest of kissed mouths north and south for three hundred miles.
“Winter is difficult. Locals are a fifth generation underclass and profoundly mean. No employment since the oil wells. We don’t have a movie theater. There’s no restaurant.” Provost Kruger paused. “But, for the self-contained man.”
“Yes, of course,” Malcolm said immediately, though it went without saying.
Patricia was in her back-to-the-land phase. They brought the retiring engineering dean’s house on Maple Ridge Road. That summer, Mac constructed a gazebo in the meadow. Patricia was twenty-four and wore long gingham print skirts that weeds and grasses stained. Not stained, but rather embossed with a pale green filigree.
Malcolm painted the gazebo white. He built two benches by the stream and scattered wildflower seeds. But it was Patty’s garden. Patty, barefoot, carried baskets of tomatoes individually wrapped in newspaper like swathed infants.
The house was encircled by a hundred-year-old apple orchard, most of them twisted and feral. Late spring was honey yellow. The afternoon air contained something ancient, with complicated properties like grainy amber and the barely detectable imprint of wings.
In mid-summer, the ring of apple trees was a gold circle promising everything. The sweetness of inflamed, seductive yellows gave him a sort of vertigo. He looked at Patricia and thought, This is a yellow I’d go to hell for, sin for, lie for and marry. It’s what he imagined late summer afternoons could be, subtle and refined like rarities in antique shops. The air was a vagrant intoxicating dust.
There was a particular moment Malcolm uses as a reference point. It was an August afternoon in a sudden warm rain. He was watching Patty kneeling on the ground. Afternoon was glazed and fragrant, intricate as a gold locket in which you engrave the names of your daughters. Patty was moistened like a European movie star shot through a Vaseline lens. He realized it could be Thursday in England or Italy. In rain all landscapes are vulnerable and slow. Rain renders history manageable. Events are compressed to the size of a canvas or a door.
And Patty became all women who walk chestnut lined boulevards and city parks. She was a synthesis of all women eating oranges imported from Portugal who sit in meadows beside statues of composers, princes and poets.
Hummingbirds came — so many the air churned with propellers and tiny buzz saws. Cardinals and enormous iridescent blue jays resembling dwarf peacocks appeared. He was professor of the air and he conducted the elements.
He meant to say birds churned the air, but instead he wrote churched in his journal. And hadn’t they been, if not happy, some version so close as to be nearly identical?
Patricia McCarty remembers that particular summer as a relentless fragrant ache. Its extravagance, its garlands of gold-hued embellishments flaunted themselves and made her dizzy. Possibilities for both absolution and ravishment rose on their own accord. Her body was awkward and shuttered. She was a fever of mutually exclusive impulses. She had found her own inland sea. She knew herself as a solitary, but she was afraid to be alone. The mewling of red fox woke her and the autumn moon was an unadulterated silver that burned.
That summer she was pregnant. She didn’t tell her husband. In early autumn, she took a bus to Pittsburgh alone and aborted it.
Patricia recognized her urge to escape and disappear. There must be schematics with details of the necessary phrases and gestures, and anecdotal accounts and stories in small print at the end of newspapers. She suspected it was a process. Each year, at CON PA or a neighboring college, St. Joseph’s, Allegheny Tech or even Penn State, a young woman inexplicably vanished during spring or Christmas break.
Lydia Kepler, 21, an attractive brunette from Baltimore, went to the campus library and inexplicably vanished. She was a nursing student with a graduate school fiancée and an affection for cats. She was on the tennis team and twice weekly volunteered at the animal shelter. She had no record of delinquent or promiscuous behaviors.
Denise Kaplan, 19, went to the Pittsburgh Macy’s to purchase winter boots and didn’t exit the building. Her boyfriend, Ricky, was waiting for her in his car. He waited until the store closed and then called the police. Her sorority sisters were shocked and her desperate parents posted a reward for information. Denise, a popular sophomore, was a member of the chorus and the Sierra Club. She was an avid skier. The Pittsburgh police were “mystified.”
Ruby Marie Johnson, 22, a senior pre-med student from Philadelphia, was last seen walking to her part-time job at Brenda’s Bakery. She was the oldest of six siblings and an honor student with a full scholarship. She planned to work with disabled children in the inner city. She tutored biology students, and had the role of Miss Hannigan in the campus Theater Arts Society’s production of Annie. The production was cancelled and detectives described her disappearance as “disturbing and inexplicable.”
Patricia wondered where the lost women were. Perhaps they were under the ground, speaking in a language with fluid syllables of rain and creeks and damp chimes. It was a local dialect of tinny trinkets and rumors. It was said there was an ocean to the east, vast, implausible gray, pre-human and incontrovertible. The vanished women don’t believe this. They can select their beliefs and devise their own hierarchies of necessity. They’re a-historical and immune.
Patricia kept a scrapbook of stories about missing women. She also collected obituaries of the murdered ones. When her scrapbook was full, she threw it into the Genesee near Hamilton Bridge.
Patricia wasn’t convinced that all t
he unaccounted for women were kidnapped or trafficked runaways. They weren’t abducted by extraterrestrials. They didn’t have amnesia. Some women chose absence, and Patricia suspected shedding an identity was liberating.
That fall she makes an appointment with the psychologist in Wood’s End. Dr. Hernandez has a suspicious reputation including allegations of statutory rape and numerous suspensions. But he’s the only psychologist in the county. Dr. Greg Hernandez is a handsome man, forty, with an auburn beard and striking sea-blue eyes that don’t quite focus. He wears dark tinted glasses and chainsmokes.
“I want a divorce,” Patricia begins. It’s the first sentence she speaks.
“Do you have sole and separate assets?” he asks, reaching for his lighter. “Bank accounts and credit cards in your name only?”
She shakes her head no.
“How will you buy a plane ticket? Or hire a lawyer in Philadelphia? What are your skills? How will you earn a living? Can you type and use computers?” Dr. Hernandez inquires. “And where will you go?”
Patricia stares at him. Then she looks down and examines her shoes.
“Has your husband physically abused you?” he asks. “Broke a bone? Sent you to ER?”
Patricia shakes her head no.
“Does Professor McCarty hurt you?” the psychologist tries. It’s a simplified version of his previous question. He thinks she is stupid. Patricia is tempted to explain that the mere existence of her husband is intolerable. She doesn’t.
Then Dr. Hernandez asks insipid questions from a notebook. Where and when was she born? She names the month of her birth; he smiles, encouragingly.
“I’m winter born, too,” he tells her.
Does she have siblings? What are their names and occupations? Is she a conservative or progressive? What’s her opinion of politicians and capital punishment? Does she go to church and vote? Does she have a pet? A hobby? A child? Insomnia, nightmares, and eating disorders? Does she believe in damnation and redemption?
Is he proselyting? Is he taking a poll? Is he a census taker? Will he recommend her for jury duty? His questions are designed to induce sleep. She realizes he’s trying to hypnotize her. Patricia considers leaving the office, going home and getting in bed. He’s just another passing snake oil salesman and she has all the right answers. Still, one must veer on the side of caution. Diminutives and mediocrities can stumble on a rare inspired intuition. It can happen by accident.
Dr. Hernandez holds a pen, makes a brief notation in a notebook, and offers her another smile. Patricia notices his teeth are white and even. He enjoys showing them off.
“When were you last arrested?” he asks, looking at his pen.
“Arrested?” Patricia repeats. She laughs. She has good teeth, too. “Why ask me such a question?”
“You look guilty,” Dr. Hernandez replies. “Tell me about your lover.”
Patricia is startled. “You think I’m unfaithful?”
“It’s possible,” he says.
“I’ve been married nineteen years,” Patricia informs him.
“But not successfully. You want a divorce,” Dr. Hernandez reminds her.
“Yes,” Patricia replies. “I do.”
“Why are you angry?” the psychologist wonders.
“I’m not angry,” Patricia replies. She feels completely composed.
“I think you’re hostile,” the psychologist decides.
They sit in silence. The leather on her last pair of black high heels is worn and shabby. She needs to go to Pittsburgh and buy a new pair. If she lived in Florida, she wouldn’t have to bother with boots and the cedar winter closet with its stacks of gray cashmere sweaters, down jackets, scarves and gloves and all the tedious rest. She’d just wear sandals.
“I suspect you have a secret,” Dr. Hernandez says. “Tell me. You’ll feel better.”
Patricia assesses the condition of her shoes. She’ll replace this pair and buy another and then red stiletto heels.
He stands up abruptly and walks from his desk toward her. He takes long aggressive strides and positions himself above her. “What’s your other name?” he suddenly demands, his voice raised, forceful and direct.
“Other name?” Patricia repeats. She’s completely alert.
“Who else lives inside you?” he persists.
“I beg your pardon,” Patricia says.
She watches Dr. Hernandez retreat. He reaches for his gold lighter and lights another cigarette. He needs to conceal himself with smoke. He’s an amateur.
“Why does your husband laugh without sound?” Dr. Hernandez wonders.
Patricia shrugs. She finds it impossible to form a sentence.
“Don’t you find it curious?” Dr. Hernandez persists.
Patricia says no. Out the window, roadside cemeteries of corn stalks and piled husks are littered. In the Allegeny mountains we navigate by tombs, she thinks.
“Maybe somebody punched him in the mouth,” the psychologist suggests. “You might think about that. We’ll explore that next week.”
She agrees and thanks him. On the highway, she considers the legions of untraceable women, solitary in towers of light, in stucco and in brick tenements, in trailers and farmhouses. Soon autumn will turn tawdry. Then the freefall vertigo of winter dusk. Perhaps the discarded were hiding in shoulder high grasses and Russian Thistle. They’re taking the pulse of thunder and memorizing varieties of grey — antique pewter, tin, pebbles beneath a rot of fog, and the sly silver of a bread knife. The women recite the incarnations of erasure in six languages. No one knows what the men do and no one cares.
When Patricia approaches Maple Ridge Road she stops the car. Other name, she thinks. She allows herself to laugh out loud. What a fuckhead. She rips Dr. Greg Hernandez’s appointment card into pieces and throws them out the car window.
One winter, when blizzards were virulent, car crashes epidemic, and the college suspended classes, Malcolm taught himself Mandarin. On journeys to conferences in China, he engaged in constant conversations with colleagues, waitresses and taxi drivers. Malcolm asks bartenders where they were born and if their fathers farm with water buffalo. Mac’s at his best with strangers he won’t encounter again. Professor McCarty, the part-time landscaper and ethnographer.
Patricia finds herself drawn to calligraphy. She has a desire, small as a shiver, to write in an Oriental script composed of symbols telling stories of ruined fortresses and crossing bodies of water. They’re creation myths that explain how the universe began and why it continues. If she had special pens, ink sticks and an apprenticeship in brush strokes, she might know the answer. She could have scrolls made from rare woven fibers and moth wings, and the core would be comprehensible.
Patricia thinks everything in Chinese sounds brutal and enraged. It’s all harsh threats and hoarse insults. Malcolm asks a janitor to describe his childhood and if he’ll be able to find a wife. She wanders museums alone, devising her own idiosyncratic translations. They’re not literal but rather inspirations. It’s nothing she would soil a paper with or dare spoil the air with her mouth, not even if she whispered.
She runs her hands across the archetypal hieroglyphics etched into three-thousand-year-old stones. They’re the original Braille, she decides, and closes her eyes. Some knowledge can only be transmitted tactically. Patricia only memorized a few characters — woman and man, big, market, heaven, sea, fish and baby. It was enough.
She prefers hieroglyphics to calligraphy. Characters resemble fishhooks and litters for concubines. Bent trees struck by monsoon lightning recur in a rash like seasons. She recognizes elephants and canoes, and a woman in a typhoon.
Hieroglyphics are more primitive and comprehensible. Their narratives are urgent. They’re the headlines of history. They’re like fossils in amber.
“You have theaters between your fingers,” Malcolm observes. It’s the tone he employs for undergraduates. He must be preparing for his office hours. And he means he’s given her this, defined the perimeter and secure
d the borders. Constellations rise from the ground and vast star systems replicate themselves on the sides of rocks. Self-contained men and women recognize and appreciate this.
“Yes, of course,” Patricia replies, prepared to kneel in dirt. In truth, she thinks gardening is boring and back-breaking. Today is bolts of steel or a river of washed rags. Malcolm says she should prepare beds for Tulips and Daffodils.
She could put on her jacket now and walk through mud and patches of ice into the forest of striped trees, curiously nude and obscene. The self-contained know miniature cities float where you stand and villages lit by votive and prayers grow under your watering can. Patricia stands at her front door. Then she realizes she doesn’t want to go there.
Malcolm McCarty is in his office, examining a hundred-year-old book he chanced to find at a rummage sale. The book is leather-bound and surprisingly heavy. The pages are composed of a paper not currently in use. The cover is engraved with the names of the author’s family in gold letters. His children and siblings and their occupations and locations are also listed. In this aspect, the book of another century possessed the qualities of a family bible. There was nothing disposable about it.
Malcolm McCarty planned to bring it to his senior seminar, to pass the book around the room and encourage his students to respond. Yes, touch it, feel the ebb and flow of the hand-set typeface. Books have oceans inside them, yes.
The content is unremarkable. But he wanted to show his students that books were once designed to endure like artifacts — an ivory inlaid table, a grandfather clock or gold charm meant to be worn at the throat. In the previous century, a book was an heirloom.
A Good Day for Seppuku Page 17
