Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  More loudly: Your favorite biography?

  Anaïs Nin—a diary, but he seemed unlikely to know that.

  Speak up.

  Anaïs Nin.

  Speak up, can’t you.

  Anaïs Nin!

  He bowed his head in what I took for a self-communing moment of decision and kept it bowed a disconcertingly long while before clearing his throat and saying Yes, well. The two of us waited there under the spell cast by mutual unintelligibility till he recollected the paperwork I was supposed to fill out. He pushed the pages toward me. My turn to bow my head. I was relieved to read such sensible questions.

  He appeared satisfied with my paperwork; he stood and said genially Now, one—

  At last we were out of that room.

  Mr. Lawson ambled toward the front counter with me approximately in tow. The old-fashioned register reigned over a long waist-high counter where books could await the clerk’s attention. To the left, wedged tight against the higher counter, was an old oak schoolteacher’s desk, and on this desk, surrounded by binder-clipped sheaves of invoices, was a typewriter, olive green and black and chrome. When Leo glanced up from the register drawer where he’d been counting coins, Mr. Lawson clasped me by the neck, the contact astounding as a good-sized steak slapped against my skin. Plainly he hadn’t told Leo another clerk was going to be hired. Mr. Lawson said Well, followed by a pause whose awkwardness neither Leo nor I made the least attempt to relieve, then again Well, followed by another beseeching pause, and I was beginning to get the hang of the pauses, this was a man used to presenting others with opportunities to rescue him socially, and as soon as I knew that I knew Leo knew I knew it, and it was ever so subtly two against one, and I thought what a pleasure that could be, being in the two of the two-against-one, based on this evidence that Leo and I could communicate wordlessly I trusted him to get to like me, and as I stood there humiliated by his heavy hand on my nape Mr. Lawson changed into the boss, who said: Well, you two will take it from here.

  From our separate vantage points, Leo’s behind the cash register, mine on the customer side of the counter, we studied Mr. Lawson’s lumbering retreat in the first of many bouts of joint mystification. The hitch in his gait roused a shiftless pity. A jacket of marvelous gray-green and tawny tweed strained and flexed across his back, and as sometimes happened to me with words, the word bespoke, whose definition I wasn’t sure of, attached itself to that jacket. His office door closed. For the rest of the day Leo carried on with business while I wandered around shelving books. Leo’s system abolished the friendly amplitude of categories like fiction and nonfiction for fussy distinctions—Eastern Mysticism, Noir, Local, Women—and when he had a free moment, Leo fetched my misshelved volumes and fitted them into their rightful homes.

  The next morning he showed me how to work the reg with its be-numeraled ivory keys, drawer of bill-sized slots and ding of closure, and watched as I counted out change for the first customer. He was a good teacher, droll, patient, his corrections discreet enough to spare me embarrassment in front of customers. I had gotten it wrong, I had believed my apprenticeship would be to the three brilliant clerks down the street, not to dogged, cranky, perfectionist Leo. It didn’t matter that he didn’t much want to mentor, or that I couldn’t have said how exactly I wanted to be like him: there was just, between us, the steady inexplicable sweetness of my learning from him, even if what I was learning was just how to show up and keep showing up.

  In the early nightfall skiers who’d spent the day on the slopes were walking to restaurants under the portal that ran along the storefronts in a sheltering roof, beyond which snow was coming down, with lights from the other side of the plaza blinking through it. Texans!, Leo named a duded-up pack going past, and when two of them turned back, Leo cast me a glance of comic incredulity meaning They heard me? and I laughed as the skiers came through the door, pausing to stamp their expensive boots, and as Leo gave them his reserved welcome I went to the back for the broom and swept the snow from the runneled rubber mat that was there for snow, but the wide old fir planks of the floor were irreplaceable and I was married to a carpenter and besides Leo liked my showing initiative. When things went the way Leo wanted them to he could be very charming, and when he was at his most charming he told stories. As a mimic he was sprightly, transformed into the despised customer who had just left or into the mailman flirting with me or into Leo’s boyfriend, Nate, talking Leo into buying a pink shirt. Next to Leo I felt unfocused, undriven, humbly heterosexual, but free of the despair that had oppressed me before Lawson’s.

  After moseying through the aisles the skiers approached the counter with two paperback thrillers and The Milagro Beanfield War. Leo hated The Milagro Beanfield War with vengeful intensity; it was our best seller. He rang the books up, nodding his big platinum-blond head when the skiers asked if it was always this beautiful here in winter and did he know what they meant when they said they could hardly stand to leave tomorrow but they had to get back to the real world? And after the door closed behind them he said Hopeless.

  What is?

  Hopeless, what we do. The despair of his tone was a bad sign; once that was in play it tended to ramp up. Look why don’t you take off, I said. Nobody else is coming in tonight. When he didn’t immediately decline I said You should get home. To Nate. When things threatened to go awry with Leo, Nate’s was the calming name to invoke. Leo had admitted to attending art school a couple of years before, where he’d been confronted, he’d said, with his own lack of talent. Not good enough, he’d said. He had begun confiding a little about himself, and always he was touchy afterward, quick to denounce any trace of what looked like attachment in me, as if confession was not talk, but sex, and we shouldn’t have done it. He and Nate owned a house Leo had shown me pictures of but never yet, I couldn’t help minding, invited me to: a little dovecote of a fawn-colored, flat-roofed early-1800s house with the usual mongrel outbuildings. Weekends were lavished on the quest for the spoons they should have, or for the right chair. That charming primitive chair the dusky blue of old milk paint—it had to be searched for, estate sale after estate sale. Nate got bored with the quest, but the chair bobbed with raffish Chagall allure across the starry sky of Leo’s perfectionism. The interior of his house was bound to end up exquisite, as the bookstore would have been, too, if he could have exercised complete control. To work under Leo’s gaze was to be found wanting, and it was as if his exasperation with me sufficed and my own could slack off, the ministry of inhibitions headquartered in his skull, now, the surveillance occurring in his pale eyes.

  And I could watch him. I could watch how he was living with our malady.

  Some time ago I had found, in a drawer of the schoolteacher’s desk, a spiral-ringed artist’s sketchbook on whose first page was a drawing of Nate yanking his T-shirt off over his head, navel and lower rib cage bared, the tip of his nose, the jut of an elbow poking the white cocoon, on whose second page Nate was yanking his T-shirt over his head, whose third and fourth and—I counted—nineteenth pages held the same drawing. The twentieth page was blank. However many times after that I took the sketchbook from the drawer, the twentieth page remained blank. The sketchbook was too charged with Leo’s frustration to be left in the drawer of the desk while I was writing. My habit was to carry it to Christianity’s tiny ghetto and wedge it on top of The Sickness unto Death, where it could wait safely till I was done for the night.

  Leo’s not saying no to my offer to stay at the store alone meant he could have been reflecting, as I was, on the likeliness of the streets’ getting more dangerous as the snow kept coming. Go, I said, testing his tolerance for assertiveness from me; and to my surprise he left.

  Snow was steadily deepening in the street; across the plaza, the last lights glimmered through its descent. The Native American art store had closed as usual at five, but Mr. Lawson wanted the bookstore to stay open till eight p.m. these last weeks before Christmas. The storm guaranteed my being left alone, so at the oak sch
oolteacher’s desk I began my ritual, situating Leo’s sketchbook, turning off lights. I fed a sheet into the platen of that typewriter with its keys poised in QWERTYUIOP readiness and fell into a canyon where it was also winter, in which I was a sheepherder, a boy in charge of a starving flock, ribs looming beneath their matted wool. When they teetered up on their hind legs to gnaw at twigs of juniper I pitied their draggled behinds’ being clotted with shit, and when, leaning over the typewriter as if it were a flame warming my cold sheepherder hands, I typed The entire world was bare as high as a sheep could reach, god, it made me so happy all I wanted to do forever was write more sentences. It would be midnight before I stopped and called my husband to come get me, and twenty minutes later the pickup truck would roll down the white street to the bookstore’s front door as I locked it behind me, shouldering my backpack with new pages in it, and in the truck the heater would be on full blast, my husband’s sleeves would be rolled up his forearms. When I leaned to kiss him the chambray of his shirt would smell of sawdust, though he would have already been to bed he would have gotten up to come get me, on the slow winding drive to Upper Canyon Road he would tell me he’d done some dovetails he was proud of though the client was unlikely to notice and would ask how my writing had gone, but how could it be explained that the enormous thing that had befallen me was a sentence about the bare world, a sentence that sounded like—that must be what I sounded like.

  In spring when the snowmelt river whose name is Santa Fe riots down the canyon, we like to lie awake listening. The roar obliterates my hours behind the bookstore cash register, his fielding the questions rich people direct at the carpenter redoing their kitchen cabinets. I’m sorry is the utterance I keep to myself, since to say it aloud would invite For what? A lighthearted For what? anticipating an apology for some funny, forgivable slip would worsen the tension between his trustingness and my guiltiness, a somber For what? would wreck me. Out of love, he’s willing to be slow to catch on, and I go to some trouble, tightly wrapping the unsayable against radioactive leaks, digging a hole to stash it in. Certain nights it’s all I can do not to tell him what I have done and beg, as I would have to, Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, it was a mistake, why that seems to have a chance of moving him to forgiveness, my saying It was a mistake, I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I lie awake imagining saying It was a mistake over and over, and if push comes to shove I know I will say it, each time I imagine saying it I feel it gain something, but what? Something like charisma, if an utterance, an imagined one, can be thought of as possessing that quality, as I lay awake saying it to myself with him beside me It was a mistake was translated from its original role of abject confession into the only seemingly antagonistic mode of assertion of innocence, since somehow guilt inhabited deeply enough is innocence. He’s been working steadily for a month now, putting in long hours. They’re subtle beyond replication, the colors of the painted wood he’s scavenged from a source he declines to reveal, but which I know, from the old Saturdays when I rode shotgun, come from an abandoned stable two winding hours north, whose thrifty long-dead owner, his guess was, had happened by a paint store the day they were disposing of dozens of nearly empty cans, the dulled red of cayenne, paled yellows, wan pinks, and ghost blues of fifty winters’ exposure deemed So unexpected by the wife of the rich couple whose kitchen is taking forever, who had said No one else will have this, isn’t that right and waited for him to assent before adding It’s got that delightful folk art playfulness, doesn’t it, gazing at him before concluding Highly desirable, don’t you think, which, repeated, causes us to lie on our backs in our bed, laughing at the ceiling.

  I say At least you know she thinks you have made something beautiful.

  He says The trouble with people like that is they can just as easily wake up one morning and decide “I’m sick of playfulness. Let’s tear it all out and start over.”

  I had been fucking a poet who lent me The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara and took me to the zendo where I sat cross-legged in the row of meditators behind him, staring at a hole in his black sock. The aloneness possible on the zafu comforted me, an aloneness in the midst of other straight-backed silent alonenesses. What if in every head around me was a vision of being held in the right pair of arms, if desire was general in that array of heads facing forward toward the cushion where Roshi sat in black-robed silence, then within each head it was called by its name—desire—and let go, if it came again it was again called by its name—desire—while far back in my mind a hand lifted and waved bye-bye to desire other forms of dukkha arose and were called by their names and dismissed, jealousy, boredom, panic, fantasy of mending the hole in his sock, fantasy of his saying he can’t live without me, fantasy of the next story’s being beautiful, of its being published, of a book of stories, of Leo’s shelving my book of stories, and when that got boring I began writing in my head, when I caught myself at that I named it writing, gratified to find that on my cushion I had gotten the hole in the poet’s sock into the first line of a story, ha, vanity, thy name is woman, the foxed mirror with its fleur-de-lis held my reflection, and all of that was five minutes on the cushion, or maybe only two, with no way of telling how much time was left before the bell I closed my eyes and named the next thing that came into my mind and the thing after that and then it got quiet and nothing needed naming and I thought So this is what meditation is like when it’s working, it’s fantastic how peaceful the inside of my head can get, I’m good at this, I will be the student whose enlightenment amazes Roshi. Delusion, what an asshole I was, self-hatred, how needy, insatiable, faithless, touchy, a sucking waste of others’ time, of others’ love, of their lives if they let me, destroyer for instance of my parents’ peace of mind, perfectionism, sit tight sit there don’t move there’s more, what is going on in the heads around me, facing forward so seemingly calmly, is it anything like this shitstorm, breathe in, breathe out, pity, amend that, self-pity, what exactly is wrong with pitying the self, it’s in trouble, the self, bone weary, is that the phrase, bone weary can’t be true, ten thousand years after its soul bled away the antelope skull was tirelessly beautiful, lately I had begun picturing the bones that would be all that was left of me; they were bound to be beautiful because the bones of a small female human are of exquisite design, torque of femur, knurl of vertebra, it was as if perfectionism had turned its gaze to the whole of me and found only my bones acceptable, an escalation, a leap in the disorder’s evolution, death esteemed as the alternative to being mired in sickening flaws; there was an undertow; was ____________; perfectionism believed it was immortal, why shouldn’t it believe that, it had been immortal so far; it was used to killing things off, grown brutal from the fare. Possibly there was no one to self in my case but the doubleness of perfectionism’s superiority and its abject object; I want no more to do with you; fear. I opened my eyes, was there fear in any other head around me, fear, it was so quiet here among the hundreds of heads, any of whom would have saved me if they could, love was the word for that, love, they would if they could, if they knew what was happening, if it showed.

  Sometimes I get so tired, I had been surprised to hear myself tell the poet, of needing to get everything just exactly exquisitely right and never never being able to, I’m sorry, I never talk like this, sometimes I’m just so tired I don’t think I can do another day of it, I’m sorry, I know how this sounds, I know we don’t really know each other, and he had said I know what you should do. That had been our first conversation, and what he’d thought I should do was Zen. Sitting. He hadn’t meant what I should do was get involved with him. He’d been writing something inside a matchbook at the table next to mine in the French Pastry Shop on a corner across from the Plaza. He’d pivoted the matchbook so I could read what he’d printed: ETERNIT. He’d closed the matchbook. You’re just going to leave it? He’d said he was doing a series, matchbook poems. The point was to leave them where anyone could find them. But I want it. He’d slid it across, past the sugar bowl on my table, til
l it nudged the saucer of my cup. The act of never-ending reading concealed in the matchbook was mine. Sometimes he would bring up that first conversation. You said you didn’t think you can do another day of it. You can’t act like you never said that. You’ve got work to do.

  I’m better now. Things are better now.

  You’re not the most convincing.

  I wrote a new story. About skaters in a travelling Ice Capades. One of them wears a bear suit.

  He would tilt his head first to one shoulder, then the other, a stretch he performed after sitting. Can you come over Tuesday?

  I’d taken the poet along to the birthday party my therapist had thrown for herself in her house in the suburbs; he had liked her intensity and her platinum hair short as a boy’s—but don’t be fooled into thinking you can talk your way out of your shit, the poet warned, what was needed were the changes that could only come from sitting, and I could learn from, for example, the late seventeenth-century Zen Master Hakuin, who had been living in the monastery for a decade, only his attentive disciples for company, when a young neighbor woman turned up at the door carrying a baby. The child was illegitimate; unless she gave it away her family would cast her out. She had assured them the baby’s father would accept the child, shelter and educate him. When she told the Master, “He is yours,” the Master said “Is that so?” and took the baby from her arms, and loved the child for ten years, watching over him, patiently schooling him, and then one night the woman returned, married now to a wealthy man impatient with their childlessness, who had decided her already existing boy was better than no son at all, and when the boy was presented she seized his wrist, telling the Master, “He was never yours,” and the Master said, “Is that so?” and the boy disappeared down the road, lagging behind his mother, gazing back over his shoulder as long as he could—And the mother slapped him, I finished, and the Master said “Fuck this” and ran after the boy and grabbed him back, and the poet said You’re missing the point.