Guy’s head on the pillow had about it a solidity, a confidence that now attracted her. She saw in the curve of his lip that which did not yearn beyond itself and was therefore contented and able to give. For some time she stood at the window: on one side the snow’s adamant falling, its white possession of the landscape, and on the other Guy snoring softly into his fist.
She was growing large and “noticeable,” as they say. She wore Guy’s shirts and some old green felt slippers she’d found in the attic. Now she thought more of the life inside, its kicks and disturbances. If she’d been a different kind of woman she’d have been comforted by this miracle, but as it was it terrified her, the savage nature of another creature growing beneath her heart, dreaming its own dreams. It was like the movie where things popped from pods and people died screaming as their bodies transmogrified.
In the attic, she stumbled on an old book on alchemy and studied for hours the arcane formulas for turning lead into gold and some absurd unreadable notations made by Nostradamus and decipherable to no one. The long beard of Nostradamus, his hollowed-out eyes, the etching which showed him holding an elongated substance up to the light all irritated her, and she wondered how mankind could have been so stupid as to fall again and again for this kind of charlatanism. Still, she studied the readings even as she disputed their credibility, predictions of disasters, the moon and sun changing places, all of it was in the nature of some badly written fairy tale.
From the books she’d acquired if not a truth per se, an atmosphere, as if she at will could be transported to a time past herself, a damp cellar room and then a landscape of fantastic wild beauty, of brambles and berries and a thousand shades of green against the sky which was closer and more protective. For this she was grateful. Since the ghost had evaporated she breathed more easily even though, truth be told, in some far-off corner of herself she was disappointed and there was an absence keenly felt as she opened the closet and rummaged around her former dresses.
Guy was involved in his work, which is to say a hardy breed of tulip having been successfully produced and symbolic of his own production, the child within the wife within the house, it all seemed of a piece to him. As for the tulip, half its petals were shaggy and the others smooth and the colors—purple, orange and yellow—she did not think beautiful, seeming to have an overlay of dust which made them grayish. Terribly proud of this abomination, the fact of his pride brought back her nausea, even though late in the pregnancy, and seemed to her inextricable from his monstrous humor and imitations and clumsy attempt to make her feel better. A scientist, he was used to accommodating the experiment after which he drained the implements and recycled them coldy, she thought.
In the middle of their dining table sat a squat bunch of these creatures bobbing their lopsided heads and having about them a disagreeable flatness despite the complexity of their design.
After Nostradamus, she’d discovered Madam Blavatksy who was more appealing and whose world, filled with astrolabes and playing cards and ivory lorgnettes in velvet and damask cluttered rooms, narrow windows reverberating with amber and green, swallows perched on the spindles of chairs, glass-beaded curtains and the surfaces of polished cherry enchanted her. Dreaming one day, she heard raps emanating from the ceiling, thus in a circuitous process was brought back to the ghost whose reappearance coincided with certain fantasies: an unexplained warm spot on the tufted dressing table stool, a smudge in the mirror, as if the silvering had been obliterated or made to lose its reflective qualities, three white stones left near the doorjamb of the bedroom, forming a pathway leading to the closet in which dresses had been rearranged and/or tossed from their hangers and heaped indecorously on the floor.
Because she was not afraid, she told Guy that she was. He too noticed the dog’s ears prick at certain times of evening or the rustle of something too close to be leaves. The ugly tulip had been abandoned and the present goal was more of the same with the aesthetic now a consideration. This for her represented a compromise, a sensitivity she had not thought him capable of and so when she described the ghost it was as if giving a gift long withheld. But she was not afraid and this was her protection from him.
From somewhere in the house, a music box began suddenly to play Eine kleine Nachtmusik and woke them. It reverberated in the dead of night, the tinkly precocious notes of Mozart, as if it were Mozart himself up and down the stairs in and out of closets. When they found the music box after looking for ten minutes or so—a time in which Guy was terrified and she was choking with laughter at his terror—she flipped the lid shut, and the music stopped then started up again then stopped. The box was in the baby’s room, up until then uninhabited, and had been situated near the bassinette on a tall table for the powder and cream. It was a merry-go-round, a parade of horses revolving to the music, and in the center a long pole with a wooden flag also revolved. She’d found it in the thrift store along with the crocheted green and yellow baby blanket and the three old prints of grotesque red-faced babies in white frames which she’d hung over the crib. This music box had a chip out of it, near the red horse’s foot, a little wedge the size of an aspirin, if that, and it must have been an old chip because the wood underneath had darkened.
That was really creepy, said Guy. He was examining the room for scientific explanations and finding none opened the window and looked out. She had decorated the baby’s room in shades of mustard and green, a troop of camels and sphinxes high up on the wall, in a kind of border. The crib was maple and inside was arranged what Guy thought of as a strange assortment—a green enameled hairbrush and mirror set, a stuffed dog she’d owned as a child, its ears chewed down to nubs, a floppy lace hat, a box of crayons and three Oz books opened purposefully to certain illustrations. You’d better clear that crib before the kid comes, he’d said more than once and now he repeated it with his back to her, staring out the window as the cold air wafted into the room, and she wrapped her shoulders in the tiny green and yellow crocheted blanket just as the music box began to play again, this time with the lid down. Oh it’s the mechanism, said Guy, relieved, and he picked it up and shook it but Mozart persisted in the wintry air, in the dark, for she’d flipped the light and said, Forget it, let’s go to bed. Then they walked the hallway with the music box and the music and at the kitchen Guy veered off and wrapped the thing in a dishtowel and shut it up in the freezer.
Everything is a metaphor for everything else, she thought as she pulled back the covers, but this idea made her nervous, as if the world were doomed to repeat itself and she in it, doomed to walk back and forth across the same territory, both interior and exterior in different guises. That night the quality of the ghost changed, although she couldn’t describe precisely what she meant by her sense of this. The air moved in wedges rather than in spirals. And there was rapping instead of apparitions. It was as if someone were hammering into the roof and Guy went to check.
Under the covers she giggled, thinking now of the famous Fox sisters who in the 1840s heard “raps” and “rapped” back to the spirits, by calling to them as if they were the devil: Here Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do. Also to have Guy checking first the roof and then the cellar to see if there were rats made her laugh. But the raps kept up, first a rap rap, then a rap rap rap and she believed the Fox sisters rapped to the spirits by rapping out letters, one to twenty-six, a laborious process which she was not inclined toward, but which struck her as humorous. She began to feel sorry for Guy though not overmuch.
Soon the baby was kicking in time to the raps and this she disliked. She recalled that night looking at the snow falling and the feeling of terror she had, the natural world falling on the natural landscape, unstoppably, eternally. When Guy came to bed he looked defeated around his mouth, he frowned slightly, distracted, the look he gets when an experiment goes awry. But instead of speaking about the raps, he said to her: You never liked that hybrid, you made that quite plain. It was hideous, she said, though I suppose in a way amazing. But no, I didn’t like it. I di
dn’t think it was hideous, he said. It was 3 am and they’d been up all night chasing ghosts, but to him it was only a symptom of something else, her dissatisfaction with his work, her withholding of approval. What difference does it make what I think? she finally said. It’s 3 am, what was that rapping anyway? It was a ghost, he said closing his eyes. Of course.
The ghost manifested itself in twenty minutes, sitting at the dressing table, she caught its cool reflection in the mirror, like a moon shining in the room, a nimbus around its edge. She felt she was greeting an old friend, she caught its mood which was melancholy and a little distant, as if there were nothing for it to do but to humbly reveal itself, as is. She understood it perfectly though if you’d have asked her to precisely articulate what it was she understood she would have gazed at her hands, shook her head. She understood the enigma of the ghost because she identified with it, she felt its feelings welling up inside of her, its pain at being disturbed late at night, its unnatural chill, its displacement into the world from which it felt unable to escape. She understood in the way of being more than in the way of knowing which would have required explanation. She did not, therefore, know the ghost, but in another sense, she was the ghost. Does that make sense? she asked Guy who was sound asleep and didn’t hear.
All this thinking about the ghost produced disturbing thoughts of the baby. She stroked her belly with a forefinger, drew circles and hearts and arrows on it, tried to summon up that feeling for it, the feeling she was supposed to feel, because she’d read about it, the mystical connection feeling or the I-know-who-you-are feeling, but whatever these feelings were they were not hers. She could summon up nothing but the fear which springs from the feeling of being possessed by something that sucked and grabbed at her insides and would have happily choked her if it needed to, to survive. This was it—she felt, if she felt anything, its awful tenacity, the overwhelming power of its will to live. Did no one ever feel this before? Was she a monster?
The ghost was brushing its hair with the enameled brush it must have taken from the baby’s crib. She noticed this absently, almost incidentally, for she was thinking of the baby, its brutality, pounding the wall of her uterus, thumping thumping. If only someone could tell her something about the world. If only this ghost knew something of value to tell her. What do you think about? she said out loud to the ghost and in the mirror she thought she saw the ghost smiling faintly, wryly amused. But Guy woke up then too and put his arm around her. I think about you, he said. Always you. His slab of leg went over hers and his cheek scraped her bare shoulder. Infuriated, she glanced at the ghost who’d vanished.
At breakfast, he offered her fresh blackberries in heavy cream, as if she were a kitten he had to cajole and tame. Her affection, lost to him, lost to him, he could not help gazing out the window at the aspen leaves rustling near the porch where also he saw the faint shadow of a woman pushing a stroller, or so he imagined. You had a right to hate the hybrid. Keep in mind that I’m a frustrated scientist. He smiled at her and resisted making a funny, self-deprecating face which he knew would annoy. Please forgive, he added.
Guy’s work, in fact, had not been going well. In vain he tried to reproduce a broken hybrid with glorious natural-looking colors. Instead what occurred were wiry, stumped, mistaken shapes with colors that seemed oddly manufactured thus grotesque. He did not dare bring them home. Always more superstitious than his wife, he felt they were a terrible omen. They reflected on his inability to breed, to understand the process of life and death. Now the ghost or what simulated a ghost in his own house. Rats. Raccoons. Some wind coming in at an angle through some floorboard, coupled with broken music boxes and his wife’s bad temper.
Was it a question of forgiveness? she wondered, gazing now at the same shadow of the same woman pushing a stroller. Whether he succeeded or failed, what was it to her, and she felt the hardness at the core of her being, her deep indifference to his existence. Yet his face was the same face she had once loved so passionately: eyes the color of twilight, as if a star could creep into them. His muscular arms, his throat so vulnerable in sleep, like a fluttering bird, she would often kiss it so as to protect. No, she no longer felt the same. All these aspects and more had now the power to dismay and revolt as if she saw from a different lens a parody of the original which to her he had become. Instead of replying she whisked the dishes into the sink and ran the water. Then she waited two, three minutes like an eternity before the door slammed shut and she breathed enormous relief into the room, going at once to the freezer where she removed the music box, cold but operable, playing Mozart.
The air was crisp as a leaf because October, season of birth, had arrived and she stood between columns on her front porch gazing at the mottled sky. The bright sound of Mozart, the leaves’ golden rustle beneath, seemed not like a ghost but a portent foretelling her happiness. Just as, under certain circumstances, the world might incline itself toward a person, she caught for the first time a glimmer of motherhood—a certain exquisite texture and smell to match, a shape fitted into the curve of her body, a kind of impossible, glorious union.
It was this idea she clung to throughout the morning and part of the afternoon, going around in a soft bliss, eschewing the attic’s gloom and the patter of the ghost on the stairs. Then she stuffed three maternity dresses, one pair of elastic-waisted jeans, a nightgown, two mysteries, face cream and toiletries into a backpack and left the house. It was her idea to check into a hotel, order room service for a few weeks, stare out of a window not her own, read trashy novels, and have the baby (it was due soon). She would go to the downtown hotel with the nice murals and the old-fashioned rooms. She liked the fact of its little coffee shop and the people who frequented it, who looked interesting, as if they had stories to tell, wisdom to impart. It had the added virtue of being a few blocks away from the hospital in case she began her labor and this way she could do it alone instead of being constantly hovered over, and also there’d be no ghost and so no way of knowing how she really felt about anything, which would be beneficial and would bring her, she felt sure, good luck.
It was twilight when she left, marching up the street to the bus stop. The ghost Helen stood at the window wrapped in an embroidered shawl meant for a piano. She felt the way she used to, liberated, careless, nearly beautiful. Indeed, her hair swept behind her in the autumnal breezes and on her cheek she felt a glow asserting itself, a pleasant, nostalgic sting at the corners of her eyes.
But when Guy returned she was already home again, sleeping with the dog, dreaming of a time before any of this happened, which was a time before her own life and was therefore a dream of her dying, falling away into nothingness, through a hole in the attic floor or ascending miraculously.
She woke up in the kitchen to the sound of the ghost dancing and dancing.
She knew it was happy, that somehow and in an inverse proportion its happiness signaled her own personal dismay. At the same time, she liked its happiness, its happiness seemed to be nothing so much as a displacement of her own and thus the same as her own. For this reason she departed to the attic taking along her usual talismans plus items from the baby’s crib, the hairbrush set, the animal with chewed ears, the music box. The lovely blanket though small was adequate and the baby’s pillow in its yellow linen case perfect. In the tender light which streamed over the foil-covered batting between rafters, she lulled herself into a state which verged on peacefulness and she slept most of the day and the days that followed, ate when Guy was at work, cruising through the kitchen with a plastic bag into which she plunked various cereals, figs, peaches, chocolate bars and canned sodas, read the soporific articles that collected dust at the bottom of the old trunk and returned to the main part of the house briefly at Guy’s return only to show her pale and fretless face, to bid him good evening, to beg his forgiveness, before scurrying up the folding staircase once again to her little nest.
This last fact impressed Guy more than he could say, being a scientist who saw immediately th
e value of a behavior beyond itself: the nest made of fragments of books and those desiccated anemones from months ago, an old sweater, baby stuff. He wouldn’t be surprised (and indeed was delighted to imagine) that she might pluck her own hair and weave it into the debris. Meanwhile he had his own communion with the ghost who mostly left him alone but emerged from the closet every now and again to brush its hair at the dresser. At these times he would watch the action of its hand and sigh deeply for there was something about the ghost which impressed him—its patience and sadness—and he was glad he was no longer a spectator but had been allowed into the midst of whatever mystery was being spun. This, he believed, was true science, always a matter of wonder and somehow profoundly unsolvable.
She, who had no such comforting perspective from her attic lair, continued to brood, hen-like. Sooner or later things were bound to change—for better or worse. And she would change too, as would the surrounding world, as would her memory of this particular world, which already, in imagination, had become dim and inconceivable.
As for the ghost its presence was hardly ever required. It drifted through the attic on occasion, never failing to bring with it a cooler breeze, its dreamy spiral of breath filling the eaves with mist. Then it would leave.
MONSTERS
Inexplicably, the roommate has hairy floots and a bumpy snout. Beneath her bonnet twitch the beige ears of a meadow vole with pink, waxy, alert interiors. She is not able to speak above a silvery whisper when she confronts him, hissing, You have to do something about your daughter. Each time he visits, she confronts him thus and also hisses, She calls me a fucking bitch and tells me she hates me. It is kind of mean of her, he agrees patiently. His daughter has been sick for longer than he remembers. The daughter’s roommate is some kind of monster, he does not know what kind. She is humorous-looking but also a bit frightening with her floots and snout.
Monsters Page 5
