by K M Cholewa
The violinist stretched the final note. It hung in the air, seeming to hold up the mourners, as if when the note ended they would all collapse at once onto the cold autumn ground. But as the note faded and vanished, only hands dropped. Rachael looked away from Tatum, and they stood in new silence.
Lee broke the trance with an escaped sob. Tatum looked to him. He was handsome without character, mid-thirties. He was tall and lean. Though more attractive than a Q-tip, he reminded Tatum of one nonetheless.
The casket was cradled in a sling and lowered by six men holding the sides. When it reached its resting place, the group murmured an Our Father. Tatum didn’t bother to mouth along. She was listening to Vincent’s voice in her head — Vincent, her lost love, grumbling about the cost of the casket and the resources wasted in sending the dead into the earth.
The prayer ended. The minister closed with canned funeral rhetoric and a vague tribute. Too many adjectives, Tatum thought, not enough verbs. She wanted to raise her hand. “How so?” she wanted to say to the minister’s assertions about Margaret’s goodness. “Give me an example.”
There was a collective “amen.” Quietly, the group dispersed, hugging separate hugs, sniffling, and moving toward the house for somber conversation and solemn hors d’oeuvres. All very respectful, Tatum supposed. But given how difficult it is to let go of lovers, favorite coats, and old letters, she thought, how in God’s name can a spirit break free from its precious body without stomping feet, clapping hands, wailing and raging? Go, go, go. We holler and wave and encourage the marathon runner to make it those final yards, to push harder from a strength not physical. Then, at death, we mumble a civil hymn and talk white noise. How’s the soul to know in which direction to fly?
At the house, despite being Margaret’s closest blood relative other than Rachael, Tatum felt distinctly like an outsider, a slightly unwelcome guest. She ladled herself a glass of punch and plucked a stuffed olive hors d’oeuvre from the buffet spread, a mix of catered food and homemade offerings. She stepped among the people clustered in small groups having quiet conversations. Tatum tried to blend without actually interacting but thought that she might be drawing attention to herself with her persistent pace. So, she sidled up where Lee was talking to one of Margaret’s more frightening-looking friends, a step or two back from the conversation. Lee was describing the chosen headstone with its inscription, Wife and Mother.
Wife and Mother, Tatum thought, a generic tribute. But critiquing the epitaph, she imagined, would be poor form, so she focused on the stuffed olive she was holding, calculating how to bite it in half without making a mess, until she detected an awkward silence. She looked up. Lee was gone and Margaret’s friend was looking at her.
“She deserved to see Rachael grow up,” the woman said, obviously repeating herself. What was her name? Marley? She looked like a recipe for pretty gone awry. Every strand of blonde hair was the exact same color. She had blue eyes and symmetrical features. All the right ingredients, and yet, they added up to something else.
“Yes,” Tatum stuttered. “But I’m not so sure people get what they deserve, good or bad.”
Marley stared at her. Tatum bit her hors d’oeuvre, needing something to do. The half left behind on the toothpick broke and fell toward the floor, Tatum catching most of it in the palm of her hand while still chewing on the half in her mouth. Marley fake smiled at her, said “Excuse me,” and walked away.
Tatum found her way to the kitchen to dispose of the olive bits that had fallen to the floor. She washed her hands and slipped away from the gathering to Lee’s den. She would rummage through the phone books to keep herself occupied. She’d done this here before and found the phone books in a pile under the same side table she had in the past. In Montana, six or seven books covered the whole state. Here, it took that many to cover the Chicago suburbs.
She flipped through the phone books, looking through the G’s for Vincent’s name and number. Vincent Goes Ahead. Though a big family name on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, “Goes Ahead” would not be a common name in the Midwest. There would not be a list of right name but wrong numbers to call and interview. Tatum looked for Vincent’s number whenever she left town, wherever she went. Losing a person to death may not be a cakewalk, but losing one to his life was considerably more complicated. In his final message to her, left on her answering machine, he said he was confused, but she knew better. The confused stay put. It is clarity that provokes us to action.
Tatum sank into the soft leather of the wingback as she turned phone book pages. Clarity and confusion. She knew the difference. With confusion the mind mulls, chews, and frets. It trips and tangles on its own so-called logic. Lots of activity. No movement. With clarity, on the other hand, the thinking is done. It was clarity Tatum felt before ingesting a fistful of pills in a Nebraska motel room ten years back. Clarity she felt before playing chicken with a bullet.
Ah, the drama of youth, she thought, smiling to herself. Her death fantasies had become considerably more tame with age. Her current one featured her dying not by her own hand but of a terminal disease that while not pleasant, of course, would not debilitate her completely until the very end. She would have a party before the fat lady sang, she had decided, a pre-wake kind of thing. Guests would receive a string of raffle tickets as they came through the front door, and at the high point of the evening, she would raffle off her stuff. From her sickbed, she would draw the numbers from a hat. The sofa: 3-6-2. The coffee table: 1-7. Books. Household appliances. The big-ticket items would provide the night’s highlight. The car. The boom box. The guests would see the raffle as a perversity, a peverse request but a request of the dying, not to be denied. Secretly, they’d cross their fingers and hope their numbers were lucky.
By the evening’s end, only her sickbed and a nightstand would remain. Tatum had shuffled through dead people’s belongings. She didn’t want it happening to her. She would clean the place out in advance, she decided. There’d be nothing left but maybe a missed safety pin ground into the carpet or an old broom leaning in a corner.
Tatum returned one phone book after another to the pile, once again coming up empty. She didn’t know that she would actually call Vincent, even if she did find the number. She certainly didn’t know what the hell she’d say.
Then, she stood and wandered in the den reading the spines of books and examining trinkets. She absently wondered what Lee would do with Margaret’s things — her clothes and her saved mementos. Though there would be no raffling of Margaret’s belongings, at least one item should have been. Rachael. Tatum suspected that Margaret would have been more comforted by a raffle to the general public than her husband’s decision.
By the time she emerged from the den, the mourners had dispersed, leaving crumpled napkins and glasses of melting ice. Tatum collected some glasses and dropped them off on the kitchen counter. Margaret’s friends filled Tupperware and washed the dishes brought full of microwaveable comfort to swallow and digest along with the immutable facts. Tatum couldn’t detect an opening in the kitchen’s traffic pattern, a way to jump in with dishtowel or sponge, so she said good night.
Tatum stepped out the front door and looked at the sky. Reluctant reds and golds crushed down into the horizon. It was her time. Vincent always knew that dusk was her moment and would put his arm around her as she gravitated to the window, the porch, wherever she had to go to witness, to see the cars opening their eyes, waking to their true and secret selves. The stars emerging, twinkling with sly. Vincent told her on one of the first nights they were together that she was born with a broken heart, and she believed he knew her for that one line.
What was it? Six months? A year? Before his tenderness turned to a sigh and an exasperated, “Lighten up.”
Alas, love is not unconditional. Like all living things, it thrives when conditions are right, withers in a drought or if it is cut off from light.
Tatum sat on the concrete step and looked out a
t a strip of deep purple squeezed between the darkening sky and horizon. Sunset on the day of Margaret’s funeral. Tatum’s stomach turned. Sick with grief, she thought, though her eyes stayed dry.
Death. Tragic and unfathomable. Yet, Tatum found in it something satisfying. It was, in many ways, a relief. In every other part of our lives we have options. We make choices, and we get second chances, opportunities to correct choices poorly made. We lose things but know there’s the remote possibility of getting them back, finding them in a forgotten drawer or pocket, of seeing them at an airport in Denver or Salt Lake. But not when someone is dead. Dead is done. That person is gone. Nothing you do, no corrective actions or changes of mind or personal transformations will alter that fact. It is final. Something where the only option is to let it be.
3
Paris arrived at Tatum and Geneva’s duplex and turned the key in the lock of the front door. Inside, there were two more doors, Tatum’s on the right, Geneva’s on the left. The old brick building was worn but not dilapidated. The crown molding in the hall was dark and heavy; the baseboard, faded and scratched. The hardwood floors were unrestored but far from shabby. There was nothing new and nothing flimsy about any of it.
He tended to his chores at Geneva’s first, buying time to see if he could concoct a reason for entering Tatum’s apartment, even if just for a second, to breathe in its scent, which was the scent of Tatum. But in fact, it was hardly a smell at all. It was more like the promise of one, or one just missed. Something fresh and wet.
But there would be no reason to enter. Last time he had the key, he had snooped through Tatum’s things, all the while skin prickling with the electricity of doing wrong and feeling watched. But God wasn’t watching Paris from an unseen place. Paris was watching Tatum. He opened bedroom drawers to untidy piles of clothing. He didn’t rifle, but he touched. At her nightstand drawer, he let his fingers shuffle past the flashlight, broken necklace, and Canadian money to the file folder. He lifted a corner of it and, upon seeing the black-and-white photo within, withdrew the folder from the drawer. The picture inside was of Tatum without a top on, a torso shot, her arms reaching behind her as though her hands were clasped at the base of her spine. Her smooth, flat stomach slipped beneath the loose waistline of her Levi’s, and her chin tilted to the side. Long strands of hair fell alongside the outer curves of her small, round breasts. Paris had never seen Tatum’s hair long.
Whereas “snooping” had felt relatively benign, “finding” had sent an eerie ripple through his body. Victory and guilt: a toxic cocktail. Paris felt it the next time he was with her, and the next, the “violate” in violating her privacy.
But it wasn’t only guilt he felt about the pictures. It was jealousy, too. Who was the photographer? Vincent?
At Geneva’s, Paris checked the food level in the cat’s dish and freshened the water in the small ceramic bowl. He never snooped at Geneva’s. There didn’t seem to be much need. Her inner world seemed on display. A pleasant background reek of a history of incense and scented candles made one privy to her acceptance of the otherworldly. Paris absently picked up a small statue of Kali, the Hindu goddess. Geneva maintained a healthy population of deities. Buddhas, feathers, a Mother Mary, and pagan figurines sat on window ledges and shelves. Geneva wrote the local alternative paper’s version of Dear Abby, Dear Belinda, and a stack of letters sat on her desk. Her responses to the distraught weren’t based in psychology, philosophy, or religion. Geneva shot from the hip. Whatever the question asked, the answer was the one already in her head derived from god-knows-what yet applicable to all questions at hand. Geneva thought a lot about a lot of things but never seemed finished with any one thought. She claimed to have a promiscuous mind, a slut of a mind, even. One day she might be in love with one idea, and the next day, in bed with that idea’s worst enemy.
Paris put down Kali and turned toward the most distinguishing feature of Geneva’s living room, an entire wall of albums, rows and rows, worn and dusty, but with all the integrity of the well-used and well-cared for. He passed them on his way out. In the foyer, he stood facing the door to Tatum’s apartment.
Inside, unlike at Geneva’s, there would be no trinkets, papers, and collections. If it weren’t for the dozen or so plants, Tatum’s apartment would be stark. A foam sofa. A coffee table and a secondhand orange chair and ottoman. Nothing hung on the walls, though she did paint one of them a pale, sage green and another displayed a floor-to-ceiling, jagged crack from an earthquake long past. The surrounding mountains rose on active faults. The city sat in a bedrock bowl filled with sediment. Paris had heard it compared to a bowl of pudding. Tap the bowl and the bowl shakes, but the pudding shakes even more.
Though Paris fingered the key in his pocket, he forced himself to turn away. He left the duplex and backtracked toward downtown, thinking about the debt he owed to Tatum. He had looked at the pictures. He had violated her privacy. Stole intimacy. He meant to pay her back.
Home by 5:45 a.m., Paris descended the steps to his basement apartment beneath a barbershop. He tossed his keys into the ashtray near the door and pulled off his work boots. He stashed them, brown and crumpled, in a closet in the far corner of his apartment. In the bathroom, he turned on the faucet in the tub and washed his feet, scrubbed the bottoms cool, uncrowded the toes and let water pour through their gutters.
Feet cold and clean, he returned to the main room. A bathroom and a main room, that was the extent of his apartment. He thought of the main room as having stations where assigned activities were performed. Not unlike the Stations of the Cross, each spot had its designated theme: Paris Cooks for the Hundredth Time, Paris Stares Out the Window, Paris Draws, Paris Sleeps. More humble than even Tatum’s, he had no sofa, just the kitchen table and two aluminum chairs that came with the apartment. His bed was a mattress on the floor.
He went to the stretch of wall that amounted to his kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept his pile of sketches. He reached to the bottom and pulled out a clean sheet. Leaning on the counter, he sketched Tatum’s silhouette in the corridor of keno machines and tables that flanked her as she had left the Deluxe. He wasn’t drawing seriously. Just doodling. Though, he thought, just maybe, he could finish a picture like this, something done from behind. No eyes for the sketching hand to tangle on. No eyes to break the flow and create that nervous energy that says, Do the dishes. Take a nap. Jerk off.
Paris remembered telling Tatum about his trouble with eyes. He had told her, looking at her grimly, as he slid open his kitchen drawer between them revealing the evidence. He had jerked his head a bit to get her to look down. Tentatively, she had reached into the drawer and shuffled through the contents — all the unfinished sketches and ambitious doodles on scraps of envelopes and the backs of flyers. They were portraits, mostly. Customers from the diner. People in the coffee shop. Smokers on stoops.
She had lifted an uneven stack from the drawer and then laid them out on the counter, slowly, one by one. She placed a hand gently on one or the other as her eyes traveled over them and among them as though they referenced each other, like puzzle pieces.
“These are good,” she said. She held her chin and nodded. “I’m impressed.”
Paris could see she was sincere, but he wasn’t looking for reassurance.
“I can’t finish any of them,” he confessed, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I get working on the eyes, then something creepy happens.”
Tatum leaned on her elbows and pulled one sketch closer, then another. She studied the spaces where there was crosshatching or white empty sockets where there should have been irises and pupils. Glimpses through windows of souls.
“Creepy, how?” she said.
Paris stepped away from the drawer and dropped a pouch of grounds into his Mr. Coffee. Tatum leaned on the counter, one foot stacked on the top of the other. In the gray light of the kitchen, in her painter’s pants and jean jacket, her silhoue
tte could’ve been that of a twelve-year-old boy. Her head turned to him, watching him, knowing the wait was part of the answer.
“Here’s how it feels,” Paris said, filling the coffeemaker with water and throwing the switch. “I’m sitting in a chair. I’m hunched over, and there’s just this ink or pencil, these lines appearing.” He paused and gathered words. “Then I get to the eyes, and it seems like, to get them right, I have to become the person whose eyes I’m drawing.” He shot Tatum a look. “Like I have to feel how it is to be them. So, as I’m drawing, it starts to feel like I’m . . . changing.”
“Changing,” she said.
“Transforming?”
Tatum crossed her arms thoughtfully and leaned into the counter with her hip.
“You mean, like turning into a werewolf?” she said.
“Same principle.”
“Well, that sounds cool.”
“Cool?” Paris said, deadpan. “I take it you missed the movies. Those guys running through the woods trying to escape the moon, scratching at the hair growing in under their shirts.”
“Hey,” she said, half-laughing, “if you turned into a werewolf, would you still need your glasses? ’Cause that would look weird. Something definitely to avoid.”
“Well, we’ll never know,” Paris said. He was unsure whether she realized the weight of what he was telling her, that what happened when he drew eyes rode a fine line between something sacred and something disturbing. The very stuff of secrets.
“It feels wrong,” he said. “It’s intimate but one-sided, which makes it creepy and me a creep.”
Paris stared absently at the pictures on the counter. Tatum was quiet, but he could feel her watching him. He looked up and met her green eyes. She smiled.
“You know what else I bet is intimate?” she said.
“What’s that?”
