by Cai Emmons
He felt her stare and looked over, eyes unguarded, surprise and recognition bubbling up through his sorrow. Stumbling to her, he laid his wet head on her shoulder, compelling her to drop her umbrella and lay an arm around his back. “Oh Thomas, I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
It was not possible that she had ever wished Isabel dead, that she had chanted to herself after learning of Thomas’s imminent marriage—less than six months after her own breakup with him—Iz is not.
Everyone loved Isabel. Morna only knew her from afar; she would see her eating lunch at the Commons, sometimes swimming at the gym. She was a big woman, tall and soft-bodied, with Callipygian hips, long dark hair, and a languid, French-y manner that Morna thought pretentious. She dressed in skirts that played around her calves, and she pinned up her hair asymmetrically, fastening it with whatever twig or chopstick or bone was available. When Morna saw Isabel she was often laughing or eating, her full mouth wide open as she savored whatever was before her.
The cellist had played the last long note, and a man approached the podium, no one Morna recognized; he was dark-haired and suited, someone long accustomed to being a full-grown man.
Morna was giving her entire strength to holding Thomas upright. She looked for a chair she might guide him to, but saw nothing nearby. Sound gusted through the church as the so-called celebrants reassembled themselves, whispering, changing positions, readying for what was next. No one seemed to see Morna’s predicament.
“I can’t do this,” Thomas said, directing his soggy words straight into Morna’s ear.
“I’m Philip, Isabel’s oldest brother,” the man said. “I know you’re all here because you loved Isabel as much as we did.”
“Were you sitting somewhere?” Morna whispered.
“Up front.” Thomas’s addled blue irises were inscrutable.
The most efficient way to get up front was down the center aisle. She off-loaded her trench coat and heaped it on top of his, secured her grip around his waist, and the two shuffled forward, Thomas’s head dipped, angled slightly toward her. Her face was on him too, so she would not have to acknowledge the scores of inquisitive eyes they were passing, like so many neon post-its. Philip was making bloated claims about death and friendship, but Morna ignored him. Under her grip Thomas still shivered, and his wet clothing gave off a peculiar doggy odor.
The first seat in the front row on the right hand side was empty. Thomas collapsed into it gratefully, still gripping her hand, oblivious to the fact that she was stranded in the aisle, hovering blimp-like above the assembled company. Someone at the end of the aisle shifted over, and after a flurry of movement a seat opened up; she took it, willing her own disappearance. As a redhead her personality had to be constantly managed. She never knew how big or small to be, how soft or loud, if she thought too well of herself, or not nearly enough. Her hair was an unfortunate light rust-red, a shade that made it hard to find clothing, that faded in summer to a grandmotherly grayish orange, and always suggested the possibility of a histrionic character or white trash origins.
When Philip stopped talking, she dared to look up. For the first time she noticed the huge black-and-white poster of Isabel mounted at one side of the stage. In it Isabel was laughing, her lips parted, so you could see the tip of her tongue that Morna knew for a fact was large and avid. The high contrast reproduction accentuated the extremes of her face—the black of her eyes and her hair, the pallor of her skin, the features themselves so big Morna had never been able to decide if they were beautiful or garish.
Thomas bent over to retrieve a paper under his chair. He slipped it onto Morna’s lap. A poem by Pablo Neruda: “I Remember You as You Were.”
“Read it for me,” he whispered. “I can’t.” He didn’t wait for her answer; he knew she would. “He was Iz’s favorite poet.” She heard in his querulous whisper a need that, in their eight months together, she had never witnessed.
The hall was cadaver-quiet when she mounted to the podium, except for a slight thrumming that she understood to be rain. The lights above her were bright, theatrical, not like church. It was a dream, faces you knew and didn’t know merging in front of you, saving you one moment, deriding you the next. The only face that came clear to her was Thomas’s, bleached and blotchy, raised to her like a chalice.
She read slowly so as not to trip over the unfamiliar words. She could feel herself flushing. She had the telltale skin of a redhead; with the slightest wisp of emotion in the air—her own or anyone else’s—blood rushed to her doomed vessels like water to a Bangladeshi flood plain. “Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul,” she concluded. Done. “Neruda was Isabel’s favorite poet,” she said quickly. Sniffling and rain mingled with the echo of her platform-heeled boots as she descended, step by clunking step.
She stationed herself at the food table alone, suddenly ravenous. There were chicken skewers, sushi, spanikopita, bruschetta with chevre and salmon spread, brownies and petit fours. White wine was being served, and no one seemed to be holding back, as if now were the real celebration.
She had abandoned Thomas, or had he abandoned her—like the entire history of their relationship it was impossible to tell. Anointed by his tragedy, he was deluged with caretakers; everyone wanted to stand in his aura. He hung on them, drank their condolences. His color was regularizing, and his ringlets were springing back to life.
There were bowls of garlic-infused olive oil, and the warm bread was porous so the oil settled perfectly into its pockets. Eventually she would have to talk to people—she’d seen a few former acquaintances eyeing her—but for now she had tunnel vision. Olive oil, food of the gods, dripped from her lips, and she leaned forward, grabbing a napkin to protect her sweater.
“You remind me so much of her.” A woman who could only be Isabel’s mother stood in front of Morna, studying her with a frank gaze. She was tall as Isabel had been, with a corona of upswept hair that billowed in certain places inexplicably, not shiny like Isabel’s, but still adamantly brown. She had the same full regal body that Isabel had had, though her breasts had capitulated to gravity, and maybe grief. Silver disks, costume jewelry, hung from her ears, and a matching disk lay at the base of her throat. The only nod to funeral tradition was a crocheted black shawl over her ecru rayon dress.
“I’m Esther, Isabel’s mother.” She reached out and took Morna’s oily hand. “Your reading, you make me weep.” The French accent was unmistakable. “Such a gift. Morna, that is your name? When you read I can see my Isabel standing right next to you.”
Esther smiled through a fresh round of tears. “I knew it will be this way. I am a piece of seaweed.” Her fingers warbled, became minnows, swam out to sea.
“Yes,” Morna said.
“I piece her together. Everyone here is a little bit of her—you know, DNA. I learn many things I never know before. Daughters are secrets tight from their mothers.” Esther sighed, and a ghastly, guttural animal sound erupted from her, followed by a pudding’ish burp. Was this a prelude to something much worse? Morna waited, terrified.
“It will get better,” Morna said. “They say it gets better.”
“Oh. Do you really think so? I don’t believe that.”
Morna hated to contradict people, and she really had no idea. Philip appeared and wanted to talk to his mother privately.
“Philip, this is Morna, friend of Isabel. Her reading is so lovely?”
“Yes, lovely.” But he didn’t smile, didn’t even seem to see Morna despite her red hair. Esther, before being whisked away, leaned down to Morna’s ear, bringing an entire world of scents, along with her nimbus of grief. “Thank you for taking care of our Thomas. I like to know you. You have some stories for me, I think.”
Whitney Vandermeer accosted Morna. She and her boyfriend were both in medical school. “I work in film,” Morna said, when pressed. She had no actual film job at that moment. Isabel had been dead for fou
r weeks, the exact amount of time that Morna had been un-partnered and unemployed.
“Have we seen any of your work?” Whitney wanted to know.
Morna smiled hard. There were the YouTube pieces with the stuffed armadillo, but god, she wouldn’t mention them. After a year and a half of soul-killing production assistant work, she was up for a script supervisor position on a low budget slasher film. She’d never been a script supervisor before, but she was a quick study and had cobbled together a resume that led to the conclusion of experience; not an outright lie, only a survival strategy. “I’ll keep you posted,” she told Whitney.
She owed Thomas a goodbye. He was still surrounded, still wallowing in embraces. She tapped his back. He spun, stared at her without comprehension, his blue eyes retracted. Behind him his pack of followers seemed annoyed by the interruption. She thought he would thank her for bailing him out, but when after a moment the thanks failed to come, she was flustered.
“’Bye,” she said. “Later.” She fled without a hug, a touch, a further word of sympathy.
Back in her apartment she squinted in the mirror, trying to discern the structural underpinnings of her appearance. She looked nothing like Isabel. Isabel looked nothing like her. Morna’s hair had no sheen; she was short and skinny; she had breasts like mosquito bites as Thomas once said. What had Esther seen?
The window remained a magnet. She sucked a cigarette and watched people leaving, lingering for wistful goodbyes at the gate under the partially clearing skies, exchanging cards and suggesting dinner plans on which they would never make good. She watched the caterers loading the empty trays into a small white van, oblivious to the famous New Yorkers buried in the churchyard beneath the cobblestones. She wondered if Isabel had been buried somewhere. If she’d stayed longer she might have found out. She thought of one of the few times, maybe the only time, she’d been face to face with Isabel. Morna was coming out of the Astor Place subway station, and Thomas and Isabel were suddenly there standing by the cube, arm in arm, idling like tourists. Thomas made the introductions: “Morna, this is my wife, Isabel.” Isabel held an ice cream cone that was drooling onto her hand. “Sorry,” she said, smiling but scarcely looking at Morna, intent on her cone, and accustomed to being the look-ee, not the look-er. She wore a lavender, cleavage-featuring sundress, and her hair was upswept as her mother’s had been today, casual and swank. As Thomas fed Morna the pro forma status questions—work? relationships? grad school plans?—Isabel’s broad raspberry tongue, busy and unabashed in its appetite, devoted itself to the cone. “Morna’s dad is a neuroscientist,” Thomas informed Isabel. “You know—brainy about brains.” Morna smiled wanly, irked that her father was being corralled to impress this woman. What about Morna herself—had Thomas even bothered to mention to Isabel that he and Morna had once been lovers? “Beautiful hair,” Isabel said as they parted.
Morna and Thomas had met when he had a show of his paintings on campus. She went because her roommate was going, and she stayed because she was riveted by Thomas. He wore a red shirt and a Jackson Pollack tie, and he guided groups of fawning admirers from painting to painting, explaining the genesis of each. They were huge canvasses, eight or ten feet tall, with bright colors overlaid with gaunt, faceless figures. Morna outstayed the other visitors. She and Thomas walked the dark paths of the campus then later drank wine in his room. “What about you?” he said. She told him about the movies she made, silly little movies that she edited on her computer, wheezy little sound tracks, noir’ish lighting, not more than three minutes long.
“Can I see them?”
“They’re stupid.”
“I need to see them,” he said and reached out to touch her fiery hair.
His paintings confounded her. They seemed so random. How did he know what to paint? He had no clear answer. Maybe he was wired that way, he said.
Once he stretched a canvas for her, and they went to the studio together, the place where the art majors worked, off limits to others. It was a warehouse-like building with high ceilings and cement walls; overhead was a hissing, eructating duct system with white pipes wide as sewer drains. Each student was assigned to an area around the periphery or next to an island at the room’s center. It was mostly deserted that Saturday morning, but for one woman named Anne who greeted them with a collegial wave and returned to her encaustic work. A few months later Morna, an anthropology major, would make a documentary film about the tribe of artists that frequented this studio.
Thomas laid Morna’s blank canvas on one of his easels, adjusted his table of paints and brushes so they both had access to them, and turned his attention to a painting in progress. She looked at her blank rectangular canvas and tried to see what it told her. It was eighteen inches square, tiny compared to his. Were there shadowy people traversing its snowy surface? Were there philosophical ideas that could be embodied by choosing to make a plume of yellow or blue? Was there a girl, maybe, floating on a bed, looking blankly at the viewer out of the middle of nowhere?
The light from outside bore through the dusty windows and collided too brightly with the white of the canvas, diminishing the scanty threads of ideas she’d come with. Thomas had begun applying paint. As if in a trance he moved slowly from the paint table to his canvas, to an evaluating position several feet away, then back to his canvas with more paint. He had been known to perform this ritualistic dance for eight to ten hours at a time.
A draft barreled through, and she put on her coat. The warehouse was vast and industrial; it invited nothing, encouraged nothing. Thomas liked having a place to work where nothing intruded on his own expressive outpouring.
Morna stood over the tubes of paint—the vermillion and burnt sienna and cadmium blue. If you chose vermillion how did you ever retreat from the shapes and feelings vermillion unleashed, even when you understood it to be the wrong choice?
After an hour and a half her canvas was still blank. From a kitchenette in the corner of the studio Thomas brought coffee for her, and for Anne, and for himself. He laid the cups down wordlessly, a quick nod to Morna, then resumed his work. Another man and woman arrived, silencing their chat at the doorway as if entering a cathedral. They settled into their areas, locking quickly into the work at hand. Ashamed of her glaringly empty canvas, Morna turned her back to everyone, walked close to her easel, brush filled with a blob of green.
A few inches from the fibrous surface, she stared at its incorrigible white. Under such scrutiny creativity was impossible. She brought the brush to her hair and stroked. The hair stood out from her scalp so she could scarcely feel the cool paint.
Esther wanted Morna to visit. She could take the Decamp #33 bus from Port Authority, get off at Bloomfield Avenue in Glen Ridge. Esther would pick her up there. Would this Saturday work? Morna listened to the message three times. It was the Tuesday after the Saturday service. Morna had been trying not to think of the event, hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, had not been in touch with Thomas, nor he with her, but there had been a flurry of group e-mails and Facebook entries about how unspeakably moving it had been.
She couldn’t believe how detailed Esther’s message was. A similar message from her own mother would have been vague and conditional, but Esther was not, apparently, going to take no for an answer.
After two sixteen-hour days that week on the slasher film, she’d been fired due to incomplete notes, and since then she’d been sleeping until noon, but on Saturday she was up by eight, weaving past the drunks and pushers at Port Authority by nine thirty, and sitting on a bus to New Jersey by ten fifteen. The bus galumphed through the Lincoln Tunnel, stopped once in Newark then began its labyrinthine crawl through the New Jersey suburbs.
Esther had asked her to bring a copy of the Neruda poem, and stupidly she’d agreed. She didn’t have the poem, didn’t have time to seek out a copy, could have e-mailed Thomas, but didn’t want to get into it.
The bus let her out on a main drag
that skirted the edge of a residential neighborhood. The bus driver had assured Morna that this was the right place, but she stepped out unsure, a conspicuous stranger. People made armpit jokes about New Jersey, but this wasn’t half bad, a rolling park on one side of the street with enormous, newly leafed maples, on the other side commodious, well-maintained houses.
It took her a moment to realize that the maroon Cadillac on the opposite side of the street was waiting for her. The driver was waving—Henry, Mr. Barrett, Isabel’s father. Morna had seen him at the funeral. He was tall and quiet and formal, a black hole of a man, neither French nor interesting, not at all like Esther. He made no attempt at small talk as they drove the short distance to the Barrett home.
“My wife is inside,” Mr. Barrett said. “I’m afraid I must go to work. She’ll bring you back to the bus stop herself.”
He drove off, leaving Morna on the sidewalk in front of a large, two-story wood-frame house, Cape Cod blue, with a well-tended front yard and a porch. It was comfortable certainly, but conventional, and she couldn’t imagine pretentious Isabel growing up here, playing soccer or kick the can with the other kids on the cul de sac.
The door opened before Morna even knocked, and Esther vacuumed her in, breathless and maternal as she kissed Morna on both cheeks and ushered her into the living room. Lace curtains dimmed the light from outside so Morna had to blink several times before the room came to life. Small wooden tables with doilies and teacups. Chests with glass doors holding vases and china. A grandfather clock. A bay window with leaded glass and a window seat. It was a room that whispered of past generations, past centuries.
Esther sat Morna on the couch and took a seat next to her. She seized both of Morna’s hands in hers. “I look forward to this all week.” She sighed. “I don’t do so well. And you?”
In the church Esther had looked not young exactly, but sophisticated and stylish in the way of European actresses, embracing her age like Sophia Loren. In her own home, however, she seemed quite a bit older; her skin had a waxy transparency; it flaked a little; and tick-like dollops of ivory makeup clung to her hairline. Beneath her navy skirt her thick legs were sausaged into hose that looked as if they’d been prescribed. That and her powdery lavender scent suggested that Esther was closer in age to Morna’s grandmother than to her mother.
