Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

  Down at the car, Cole and Dylan hug Bit wordlessly and get in. The car moves off. After his friends have gone, the sound of a woodpecker in the forest redoubles, festive as castanets. There is a puncture in the world, and everything Bit knew about himself is escaping.

  Hannah wakes him in the night. Baby, she murmurs in his ear. Grab your things.

  He has kept a brown bag under his bunk for a week now and takes it out, and climbs out of bed, full-clothed. When he stands up, Hannah is already gone. He catches her on the spiral staircase and sees something hard shimmering on her face.

  Out into the cool. Down the slate steps. He cannot look back; he knows what happens when one does. There is a car coughing on the drive, a junky Pinto. Abe already sits in the front seat, his wheelchair strapped to the trunk. The family’s few effects are on the backseat, in a box. Bit knows that the faceless cloth babydoll on top, an Amish gift, is stuffed with high-grade bud.

  Hannah closes the door and puts the car in gear. The forest is hunched as they slide past, the Gatehouse is dark. The County Road curves to the path that pushes out to Verda lonely in her stone cottage. There, Hannah turns off the engine, and Bit and she climb out (the cherries in full fruit over the night-darkened door making all slick underfoot). Eustace gives a desultory woof, and Verda emerges in a white nightgown, holding her rifle on her shoulder. Slowly, she lowers it.

  Oh, she says. The day is come.

  I’m sorry, Hannah says in a whisper.

  Verda disappears inside. She comes back out with a bundle she places into Bit’s hand. I won’t see you again, Ridley, she says. He hugs her fragile bones. Hannah steps up and hugs her too, and Verda says, Go along then. Her hair blazes in the headlights, but her eyes are only sockets as they pull away.

  Bit unwraps the bundle. In it is a bag of rosehip tea, a four-inch thickness of papers bound with a ribbon, the scrimshaw, a wad of cash as soft as mouse fur. He hands the papers to Hannah, who pats them and returns her hand to the wheel, and the money to Abe, who gives a whistle. Bit holds the scrimshaw, feeling the fine carvings with the pads of his fingers until he has memorized the shape of the face repeated in the bone.

  He leans his head against the cool window. The same moon hovers. A line flaps with sheets, a mailbox shines. The road passes beyond everything he knows of it. They go around a bend he has never been around, a house he has never seen; all is doubly new, sick with newness. A bridge made of steel; an ice cream parlor; cows, much larger than what he’d imagined cows to be. A sidewalk, a flag on a pole. A brick school. A Ferris wheel. The endless hills, heaped and sleeping.

  The sun rises. In the window, it reflects him back to himself. There is so little to Bit: a fine hem of gold hair, the filthy neck of a teeshirt. Fragile, pale flesh over a sharpness of bone, and eyes so vast in his face they threaten to swallow the world just now spinning past, threaten to be swallowed by it.

  It is early October. Outside, the city rests between the winding down of day and the winding up of night. The fish-shaped nightlight shines a creamy cup on the wall and Grete is curled against Bit. From where he sits against her headboard, she is all eyelash, forehead, tiny slope of nose, his beautiful daughter.

  Sleepy yet? he says, and she says, No.

  He doesn’t mind. He could stay here forever against his daughter’s small warmth. He looks at the mural he’s painting on the wall across from her bed, the only thing he can do to fill the restless hour between when he comes home from the university and when Grete is walked back from daycare by Sharon, the mother who lives in the apartment downstairs. Sharon is a small, quick, dark-haired woman. Her name is about all he knows of her; yet Bit feels close to her. He once said, on a morning that he was picking up Frankie, We’re a good team: solidarity of the abandoned! But this was a mistake, and Sharon didn’t smile.

  The painting on Grete’s wall is Arcadia, the apple trees twisting up toward Arcadia House, the Octagonal Barn, outhouses, Ersatz Arcadia, Pond. He has spent months detailing the landscape, and now has begun to populate it. The only people in the painting, yet, are essential: Hannah in the garden, Abe in his wheelchair under the courtyard oak, Astrid holding a newborn baby to the sun, Handy on the roof of the Pink Piper. There is Verda and her dog, Eustace, at the edge of the forest, only a dapple of sun if you don’t know to look for them. Cole and Dyllie play cards; Jincy stands in the door of a lean-to, a white bird on her roof; Leif dances under a puppet; Erik sits, a blob; Ike is frozen in a swan dive into the Pond. Bit himself is tiny, studying Helle. She is long and white, on the rock with her feet in the water, a naiad.

  None of it is as beautiful as the place that lives in his head, of course. Though the vast gulf between imagination and execution is familiar, it still always comes as a sharp surprise. It is a relief, though, from his photography: all his art, these days, seems to die under the pressure of his teaching. It doesn’t matter that the mural is not how Arcadia looks anymore, taken over by Leif’s computer animation business, Erewhon Illuminations. Leif has gutted, sleeked, chromed, and glassed the entire second floor of Arcadia House for his own private quarters; one man now lives where, once upon a time, over two hundred had slept. The Octagonal Barn has become office space and conference rooms. There are tennis courts in the soy patch, a parking lot where Dorotka’s garden had luxuriated.

  Leif always did hate weeding, Helle had said when they first toured the new Arcadia, and they had laughed, the laughter catching in their throats. He nuzzles Grete’s shoulder, popcorn and warm milk, to banish the thought.

  Sleepy yet? he says, and Grete says, No. Story.

  He searches for one he hasn’t told her, and feels it rise in him when he looks at the white bend of Helle on the rock. Okay, he says. This story is about the very first Helle. The one your mom was named after. In Greece, a long, long time ago— But Grete interrupts.

  No. Once upon a time, she says.

  Once upon a time in Greece, Bit says, there was a beautiful girl named Helle and her brother, Phrixus. Their father had divorced their mother, and the new stepmother, Ino, was wicked, wicked, wicked, and jealous of the children. She plotted and planned and decided to make Helle and Phrixus into scapegoats. She baked all the seeds in the land so they wouldn’t sprout, and when the plants didn’t grow, the farmers panicked. What do we do? they cried. Who is responsible for this famine? They went to the oracle that Ino had bribed, and the oracle pointed her knobby little finger at the children and shouted, They are! Those horrible children! And the farmers hustled the little ones away to kill them, to get rid of the curse.

  But their real mother went to the god Hermes and pleaded for her children. Please, she said, I love them, please help them. Hermes was moved by the mother’s sorrow and sent a flying golden ram that picked up the children to carry them to safety over a body of water called the Dardanelles.

  Bit pauses. Funny fact, he says. Lord Byron once swam the Dardanelles.

  Who? Grete says. She is three.

  Never mind, Bit says. Anyway, the ram flew so high that Helle grew dizzy and fell off its back, down, down, down into the water.

  Now Bit has to scramble to change the story. He hadn’t thought it through to the terrible end, the drowned body in the waves, the very first poor dead Helle. How Grete would think of her own Helle, her mother, and conflate the two lost women.

  So he says, And everyone laughed and pulled her out and gave her a crown and made her a queen. She lived happily ever after. And they found another, better, name for the water she fell into: the Hellespont.

  The Helle spot, whispers Grete and carries her smile with her into her sleep.

  All is dark in the window. A passing car’s headlights draw an arm of light across the room. He closes the curtain and shuts the door. Bit feels the coolness of the wood on his fingers as he moves through the dark apartment alone.

  Bit’s grief changes shape nightly. His head is already with the Greeks; he thinks of Proteus, old man of the sea, the truth teller who hated truth and would shape-shif
t to avoid it. Bit reaches out his hands to grasp his sorrow, and it slides through, becomes water, a snake, a mouse, a knife, a dumbbell so heavy he has to drop it. It has been over nine months since Helle went for a walk and didn’t come back.

  He wonders at himself, sitting in the window with his wine, watching the nightclub across the street begin to glow. He is tenderhearted Bit Stone; he cries when he reads Russian novels; he cries when he sees the hands of the woman who comes to clean his apartment, gnarled with callus and arthritis. He hasn’t cried for Helle. He keeps thinking it will all be explained to him, that he will wake up one morning to hear the key in the lock and Helle will come in, weary; that he will cross a sunlit park, and look up, and there she will be moving toward him, her shy smile on her face, and hug him and whisper into his ear some story that won’t mean she had been hurt, that she had wanted to hurt him.

  He thinks he sees his wife everywhere. His heart pulses, sure that a thin figure in the distance is Helle; he runs into a café, certain that a half-glimpsed face in the window is hers. They never are. He is stuck, he is suspended. Under the strain of his hope, his daily walks through the city have become unbearable.

  The night before she vanished, Helle had woken him. It was very late and her hands were cold on his chest, the smell of winter rain in the folds of her clothes. Her hair was wet against her forehead and cheeks, her face in the darkness unreadable. She had shrugged off her raincoat and boots in the middle of the floor, and he was groggy when he woke at the cold shock of her. He saw the rug getting damp with her wet clothes and, irritated, almost pushed her away.

  But her hands moved down, unbuttoning his pajama top, bending her body toward his so she lay against his skin, and he put his arms around her to stop her from shivering.

  What’s wrong? he said, but she didn’t answer. She peeled him out of his clothes, pajama top, bottoms, socks, boxers, then pulled off her own clothes violently and came back under the covers where it was warm. Her cold body, knobby and terrible against his.

  Helle? he said.

  She didn’t answer. Now her mouth was at his chest, moving across it, biting, not hard. The door was cracked open and there was a light still burning in the kitchen, and he could see that her makeup had washed off in the rain. Without it, her face was ravaged, the hard life she’d lived before Bit, her twenty lost years, imprinted on the skin. You’re more beautiful to me now than when you were perfect, he’d said once, kissing her shoulder when she cried at her reflection in the mirror. She’d turned away, disbelieving, but he’d meant it. Her life was written in her face. There, at least, she could be read.

  His love for her sometimes felt enormous in him, a solid thing made of spun wool, soft and deep. Even in his irritation, this love warmed him, returned her to him.

  Her mouth moved down, then farther. He touched the top of her head, her fragile skull under wet hair, pulled her up gently. He wanted slowness, warmth, kissing. But she wouldn’t. She grasped him, though he wasn’t quite ready; she wasn’t either, she was dry, still cold. But she moved just slightly, sitting there above him, and after a few minutes he took the bones of her hips and pulled himself in until he’d fully stirred. She pressed down again, her body against his chest, and at last her mouth found his. He imagined the quiet street outside shining in the lights, the millions of souls warm and listening to the rain in their beds. He couldn’t stop looking at the side of her face, her eyes closed, the small shell of her ear, the scar in her nostril where the stud had been, her thin pale lower lip in her teeth. He was close but held off, until at last she whispered, Go. I can’t come.

  He wonders now, the wine bottle empty on the table, if he hadn’t heard all of what she’d said. If he’d missed the most essential word. Again and again, he has replayed it, trying to hear deeper, to find the moment that foretold the future.

  Go, she said; and did or didn’t say, I can’t come.

  Go, she said; and did or didn’t say, I can’t come back.

  In the morning, Grete dresses herself: leopard leggings, frilly pink dress, green rubber boots with googly eyes that spin and spin. She considers wearing her ladybug earmuffs, turning her head this way and that in the long mirror on the door and pursing her lips. She decides, instead, on one of Helle’s long strands of purple beads, looping it over and over so she looks like a Padaung woman. Sharon opens the door with a cup of coffee in her hand and whistles. What a fashion sense, she says. Watch out, world, here comes Grete!

  Grete hops on her toes toward the door and mashes her face into Sharon’s thighs.

  Sharon’s son, Frankie, comes out. He is an owlish boy, half crushed under his enormous backpack. He hands Bit one of his shoes and says, It came off. When Bit kneels to put the shoe back on, Sharon smoothes down Grete’s fine white hair, and Bit sees with a pang that he’d forgotten again to brush it this morning. Grete is a dandelion gone to spore.

  Sharon takes an elastic from her own short hair and pulls Grete’s back into a ponytail. She smiles at Bit, the skin by her eyes crinkling, and she’s no longer the rumpled middle-aged mother he sees every day; she is pretty. No harm done, she says.

  When Bit stands, Sharon hands him the coffee and kisses both kids on the forehead. See you this afternoon, she says. Be good.

  I am good, Frankie says in a hurt little voice.

  I’m bad! says Grete and gives a wicked laugh.

  They go off, Grete holding Bit’s hand, Frankie clutching Grete’s, into the streaming tides of people. Bit’s own Kid Herd of two. In the morning crush, the children are swallowed by legs and rears, smashed with purses and briefcases. In a marl at a stoplight, Bit bends and lifts them in both arms. The children lean their heads on his shoulders and breathe into his jawbone. Their school is squat and brick, shielded by scraggly plane trees that Grete hugs solemnly, one by one, before they go inside.

  The teacher is a plump woman so tender-looking that she seems as if her skin would bruise if she were yelled at. She looks at Bit and gives a little tremulous cry. Oh, my, she says. Are you okay? Are you getting your sleep? Are you eating? Oh, you don’t look so good.

  I’m fine, I’m fine, he says, and fine, fine repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.

  It amazes Bit how well he can teach with a fraction of his attention. Better, perhaps, than when he is fully invested in what he’s doing. These children of blog and text go uneasy near focus. They clam up. He is more relaxed when he can’t give a damn, and they are too. They learn.

  In the red glow of the darkroom, skinny, odd-looking Sylvie tongs paper from one bath to another. Bit stands beside her. Her skin is marked with raised moles, and she smells like powder, coffee, honey shampoo. She looks up at him. I love this, she says. The darkroom. I didn’t think I would. Digital’s just so much easier, you know?

  I know, he says. That’s why I don’t do it.

  Sylvie gives a private smile. That’s your reputation, Professor Stone, she says. Nobody says you’re easy.

  He is startled; did he mishear? There are too many ways to read what she said, three at least, and Sylvie always seems to speak in layers.

  He backs away through the rubber curtain, and into the bright room where the water bubblers gurgle. He sits on the table and lets his students slowly flock to where he is. How sweet they are; the boys are inches taller than Bit but sit in the chairs to reestablish Bit’s eminence. The girls play with their hair, watch him from the corners of their eyes. They know his story somehow: since Helle vanished, he has become more handsome than ever to these susceptible young women, the weight of his tragedy transforming his soft features into something noble, suffering. He feels himself flush and speaks to shak
e his embarrassment.

  All right, my friends, he says. Out with your notebooks. This one is the toughest yet.

  Most weekends he gives his classes a mission. Make a camera obscura in your room and draw what you see. Photograph strangers on the subway without letting them know what you’re doing. Stand in the pitch-black film closet and roll twenty rolls of film, blind. When you come out, write down everything you’ve thought of in there without self-editing.

  His job is officially to teach the lost art of the darkroom; analog studies in the Photography Department. Or what used to be called simply Photography, all that chemistry and film, most recently downgraded from a requirement. Digital is just so much easier. It has been years since he taught an advanced course, the wet-plate, the large format. For most of his students, his classes are way stations into a hobby. But his job, as he understands it, is to help his students see: to make them pay attention, slow down and appreciate what they’re doing. This is something they can use in life.

  This weekend, he says to the eight faces arrayed at the table, you will go on a digital fast. He catches himself: he’s almost said yoga, vestige of Arcadia. Doubleplusgood duckspeak he sometimes calls the old language, laughing, when it comes out despite his censor. I was raised in a commune, he’ll say, and he’ll feel a bit treasonous and tell some of the funnier or sadder stories; the summer they all got hepatitis from eating the watercress in the stream near the Family Quonset loo; what happened to baby Felipe, whose white crease in the fat brown neck remains indelible in Bit’s memory, even thirty-five years later.

  What’s a digital fast? says Sylvie. There is a designated speaker in every class, and she is it for this one. Awkward girl, overeager. He has to be extra gentle with her. Her eyes fill with tears after a curt word.