Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  The doorknob was tarnished brass, cool in her hand; black and white lightnings underfoot that Demetre had brought back from some southwestern trip, handwoven geometries of the fifth and final world. Even before she opened the door, she recognized the next CD that clicked into the player. “Demetre, for God’s sake….” From his stillness where he stood, fixed between the music and the canvas, exclusive and intent, she did not think he had heard her. A week ago, a day, half a hour, she would not have cared; seated herself on the spring-shot bed whose rumpled covers smelled more of dust than guests and framed imaginary shots in her mind: the overcast, Demetre’s pagliacco profile, lamplight in sloping pools. Now there was a seasick roll of anger in her stomach; even odds on the headache, and nothing in the song helped.

  She had never heard before how much silence there was in the music: the piano like a child’s spidery singsong, the whisk and leaf-graze of jazz brushes, and only a chord here and there from the guitar at a verse’s turn, a broken underscore. Only when the singer’s voice lifted from its whisper, that sibilance and the concealment of a smile had planed down to genderless smoke, could she even guess at its owner. The breadcrumbs blew away, the candle burned the moon…. A little rich for Cass’ voice as pale and peeled as his name, but Liora’s had a truer grain, and she would not have crooned like a lover where she could have knife-twisted the words even a little. Half-murmured, the ghost of a narrator, and as the piano mocked to itself, Chez vous soon.

  The words might have been a promise, or a threat, and either as inescapable as the other. Over them, as sharply as a retort, Vetiver said, “Do you have to listen to that album while you work?”

  Demetre answered mildly, “I like it.”

  “You’re playing it every time I come over.”

  “That happens.” In one corner of the canvas, he had printed with dead leaves like lithographs, ink all the shades from maple-scarlet to old bronze. If he had opened one hand to her, she could have read his palm like a Rorschach; he only looked a little puzzled, less defensive, mostly impatient. “Remember how many times you played The Waking Side of Sleep? I’d have left that CD in my car if I’d had any sense.”

  “That was different,” Vetiver said flatly. There were small pieces of bone on the table, beside the watercolors; green-flecked, sponged through with moss. As hastily as though the white keys were telltale bones themselves, the guitar strung with a dead woman’s hair, Vetiver stooped and twisted the volume down on blond, lanky Elie Shusteff , who in one photograph had leaned against a cinderblock wall like a phantom at the feast, disconnected, unremoved. As though she had done murder herself, and the headache were her guilt. The oldest penance of pain.

  “I hadn’t stopped taking my meds,” and she held up the bottle like orange amber, childproof-capped, so that he could see more easily the date and all the pills unswallowed and safe inside.

  “Vetiver.” His gaze slid back to the canvas, half landscape and half collage, all the colors of sun and cold earth. Only a slight crease between his brows, that were faded brown as his hair had never been in all the years Vetiver had known him. “Don’t yell.”

  “When did you stop?” She hated how her voice slammed into him, condemnation and condescension: she did not care. “Last week? Six months? Don’t you remember—”

  “Vetiver, I didn’t—”

  “How long?”

  “For fuck’s sake!” She argued so rarely with Demetre, she had forgotten that he could actually lose his temper: no extravagance or broad theatrics; nearly still, drawn tight and expressionless, and only the paintbrush in his left hand shivered slightly. “What do you care? I don’t hallucinate. Do you think I’m going to get violent? None of the old rituals have come back and I’m not hurting anyone. I need to finish this piece and the meds—” He stopped, visibly, half a sentence away from cliché: the painter under the maddening spell of la Fée Verte, the poet coughing up his life’s best work in consumptive clots, all the dead and romantic artists who made addiction their inspiration and sickness their muse. “Shit,” Demetre said, no rise or fall in his tone, and he laid the paintbrush carefully on the table, between deer bones and a half-empty bottle of black cherry soda, and wiped off his palms against his hips. “Vetiver, I play Nobody’s Home because I like them, I’d have called Dr. Blair if there were any problems, and this work is not going to get finished if you shout at me. Can you—”

  “Can I what? Leave your brain to chase itself into smaller and smaller circles until you won’t even pick up a brush for fear you’ll fuck it up?”

  “No.” When he stepped forward to take the prescription bottle from her hand, she saw how tense his shoulders had become, no matter how gently he spoke. No central air in a house this old; there was sweat even on Demetre’s wrists, but cold sank down her back like winter mercury. “Can you not treat me like an idiot.”

  Like a broken record: a useless spell. “If you go back on your medication.”

  “As soon as I finish this piece. I’m not messing with my health in the middle of a project.” As calmly as though he had offered a compromise: scanning the printed label, his name and the doctor’s name and the dosage, before he set the bottle down among all his painter’s paraphernalia; a rainstick’s worth in calculated milligrams. When Vetiver shook her head, she would have sworn she could feel the headache’s weight behind her eyes, cancerous, cast-iron. “Chez Vous Soon” was still a murmur underneath their taut silence, as mindful as a scar. Demetre might have been sarcastic, as he tested the paintbrush’s stiff-dried tip against his thumb, or the words might have been awkwardly sincere: “You can put on some other music if you like.”

  **

  You pried the planks up

  Strewed salt on the floor

  Rosemary at the windows

  Rowan over the door

  **

  The dry and dark morning, branches smooth with last night’s ice and the streets still treacherously glossed, and the kitchenette counter was cold under her palms: salt-and-pepper granite polished across its grain, that had first attracted her to this apartment and its brownstone chill, and her coffee was cooling almost as fast as the raisin bran she had poured milk over was softening into sludge. Still in her bathrobe, her hair sleep-flattened all different ways, Vetiver stirred indifferently at the cereal and wondered if she could still cancel the shoot. Only yellowed light from the bedroom slanted through onto the linoleum, most of the shades down; maybe she could crawl back into bed and sleep this time. But the clunky phone on the countertop was ringing like a carillon wasp, and she must have made some noise that sounded like hello, because the woman on the other end of the line said cautiously, “Julia Lawrey?”

  “Vetiver. I go by Vetiver. It’s my middle name.” When she looked out the nearest window, the sunlight was as low and leached as the dead of winter. Too tired for humor, her parents’ theories about dull and exotic names, she said only, “What can I do for you?”

  Down the wires, the woman dragged in a breath so heavily that static flurried into Vetiver’s ear. “I don’t have the wrong number, do I? This is Carol Meade. I’m calling about Lewis.”

  “Demetre?” There was ice closing in her throat, as cold and dense as last night’s storm. The name that she had always known was as slantly true and untrue as her own, and she repeated it like a charm against this stranger’s silence, cross fingers and spit and she would not have to hear what came next. “You’re talking about Demetre? What’s happened?”

  So carefully colorless she could have been no one, the woman named Carol Meade asked, “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “Two or three weeks ago. We didn’t exactly have a fight,” however much she would have preferred one. Calling his name, two or three times, before she came back in from the kitchen; cloves and cardamom to strain from the mugful of cider she carried, a steam of spices. The prescription bottle had still been sitting on the crowded table, like a pointer to his singlemindedness, the season that had drawn him in, and he h
ad said over his shoulder, You should understand. I’m painting the fall no one else can see. For the first time, she might have been afraid, but she asked, How do you expect me to see it, then? and Demetre, candlelit like his own effigy, penny for the guy, only laughed. She’ll see you. That’ll be enough. Vetiver’s gaze had frozen onto the canvas: the mounting chaos of paints and chalk and pen-lines, shellacked bone and leaves, stalled-out intimations of figures and anatomies more autumnal than human; but nothing looked back. She? Vetiver said, very softly. Only Liora Elliott had answered, all invitation and uptempo arcana. Show me how the razors shine, how the gods of childhood lied, and how the bones and bitters twine…. By the time Vetiver walked out into the rain, Demetre might have forgotten that she was ever there at all. She said now, and very quietly, “We haven’t really spoken since.”

  Carol Meade made a small, throat-caught sound that Vetiver realized after a moment was a swallowed sob: not colorless, after all; someone. “I’m sorry, Ms. Lawrey. I’m so sorry. We thought you knew,” and what she should have known, Vetiver did not even have to ask.

  She heard the details anyway, while her coffee chilled and her cereal dissolved and the slow pressure that was not a migraine gathered inside her head: how Lewis Duncan Moran had run his junkyard Ford Escort off the highway and into the guardrail at three o’clock in the morning and ninety miles an hour and the paramedics found windshield glass shot through him like ice, precious ore in the earth. The last time Vetiver had ridden in his car, clear September light and the leaves were only starting to turn, she had teased, We’re in a museum piece. I swear it runs on cuneiform and curse tablets—powder-blue and rust, full of transmission growls and brake squeaks, and the back seat had rattled with old tapes whose cases had vanished into the paper-strewn no-man’s-land under the front seats long ago. Demetre had laughed, cranked up A & W another notch. It does stall in certain phases of the moon, and they sang along to medievalist punk all the way home.

  Long summer’s day I dig away and lay the bodies in their graves. A short and sun-dying day in waning autumn, and Demetre was ashes already. Vetiver ground her wrist against her eyes, childlike, futilely, to push the tears back. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll come to the memorial. Thank you for telling me,” and after she had hung up the phone, still holding onto the receiver as though she had forgotten to let go, what hands were for, she picked it up again, and canceled the shoot with Maria.

  **

  The leaves have fallen

  The shadows spilled to seed

  The wind plays through the ruins

  The flint and the flower

  The toll

  Chez vous soon

  **

  She went to the memorial service in black jeans and a sweater dark enough blue to pass in the right shadows, because she had no suitable dresses. Fifteen minutes on the bus, pockets full of Kleenex and the bright cold grained like lead inside her, and she would have liked most to photograph the churchyard’s dry-stone walls; no ministers and no priests, because Demetre had dropped Catholicism as easily as his given name, but a black-suited man who might have been a sexton or a relative had come up and lit a candle on the altar, white wax and the flame’s tremble and flicker was almost invisible in the electric and stained-glass light. The old-incense smell in the air might have been prayers, unanswered and gone to dust. At least the flowers on the altar were not lilies.

  Halfway through the service, and she had been all right until the music started. Outside in the late November wind, Demetre’s mother had clasped Vetiver’s hands so tightly that all the bones ached together: a small woman in slacks and no makeup, squirrel-brown hair streaked grey, so used to crying that tears slid unnoticed down her face as Vetiver extricated one hand, folded the older woman into a clumsy hug and held her as closely as she had never held her son. His father dead since the early ’80’s, no second husband; but the rye-braided woman a little younger than Vetiver, her chemist husband and their child somewhere in the shift of strangers, must have been a sister: she had never thought of Demetre as an uncle. The Swiss couple that had sponsored Demetre’s show last summer, the same fair, windburned faces and she had never been sure if they were brother and sister or husband and wife; Robert from the gallery, almost unrecognizable in a black turtleneck and a blazer, his mouth cornered ruefully and his eyes still smudged from crying; Carol Meade, in the flesh old enough to have been Vetiver’s mother; she shook all their hands and hugged the ones she knew best, patiently repeated no to the friends who had assumed she was a relative, the relatives who assumed she had been a lover, and did not trust herself to get up and speak. There was too much bitterness knotted in her throat with the tears.

  The passports never take us where they used to…. The opening lines were little more than a breath over the sound system, but Vetiver snapped her head up so sharply that for a moment the church was white light and motionless: the clarity of the unreal. Someone had put on “Paper Trail,” from Chez Vous Soon. So much of Demetre had been wrapped up in music, the tribute only made sense: the slowest and gentlest song on the album, no implacable infatuations or salt-ground love, only Liora’s guitar as wavering as something played underwater and Cass singing too softly, What else do you need to know? I held you so close, I let you go, and photographs don’t even know your name. Vetiver’s hands clenched on one another, nails fierce enough to break the skin. Beside her, Robert whispered, “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to leave.” She managed to whisper the words, not shout them: she did not know if it was anger that choked her, or loss, or plain and common pain, but she shook her head twice before she could speak again. “I have to get out of here. I’m sorry. Please tell them I’m sorry,” and he squeezed her hand once, warmth and awkward comfort, before she was fumbling her way down the pew, out toward the sunlight and the churchyard where no music played.

  **

  Chez vous soon

  **

  Shrugging on her jacket as she left the chapel; the heels of her dress boots, more formal than sneakers and at least black, louder than she wanted on the hardwood floor. In the high-windowed foyer, another or the same someone had put up pieces of Demetre’s art—canvases, sketches, substitute snapshots—like a postmortem show, perhaps truer than any photographs or remembrances could have been. The Night Boat, hand-blurred hieroglyphs and a pale figure kneeling in the bow, and only Vetiver knew that the smolder under the black sand was meant for the sun. The Wake, a sketch in colored chalks, and the man piecing together thirteen fragments of a woman, her hair fanned out like roots, her fingers fallen into wheat, had Demetre’s own face. Daylit, unfinished, the painting marked Fall #3 looked only like another work in progress, less vision than confusion.

  As she never would have done when Demetre was alive, Vetiver reached out and, deliberately, pressed her fingertips against the paint-clotted surface. “Lewis,” she said aloud, the name she could not hear as his. “Damn it….” Cool under her touch, a bone-curve that could have been the line of a shoulder or the leaf-trace of wind. There were even feathers imprinted into a swathe of oils, rust and verdigris and dark, dark earth. Until the woman spoke, Vetiver would have sworn that there was no one behind her: still there was a cat’s-foot chill down her spine as she turned, and she would rather not have had Demetre’s painting at her back.

  “I wanted him to finish this one.” On second look, the stranger might only have walked in from the cold, the church doors propped open to God and passersby. But she did not look like a mourner, or like family—her calf-high boots and her fringed leather jacket, mottled green as a turtle’s flesh; the thousand fi ne plaits of her hair that still swung past her shoulders, weighted like coarse black silk, and her dark face modeled as austerely as a tomb painting. Thin bronze bracelets on her wrists, and her earrings were the gas-flame hearts of peacock feathers, cut like cat’s eyes. Her voice was low, cadenced. She was none of the models that Vetiver knew. “I wanted to see his fall.”

  No way not to hear the ambiguity,
however unmeant; Vetiver shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, looked narrowly back at the woman clothed like the late earth. “Yeah, well, I wanted him to finish it, too. But mostly I wanted him to start taking his fucking meds.” What she had not said to his family; not even to Robert, as thin and angular as Demetre’s mannerisms, his dark-brown hair newly trimmed, neat as his own funeral, and he had passed her a handkerchief stitched with his lover’s initials when she ran out of tissues. “Not let his life fall apart. Again. I can’t—” She could not look at his autumn’s abyss anymore, and still speak clearly. “Damn him. Fuck him. He shouldn’t,” but there were too many words, there were not words enough. “That fucking band,” she said instead, and knew how much she would have liked Nobody’s Home, if Demetre had never played their music for her.

  “He never played them for me,” and before Vetiver could ask what she knew of Demetre, his songs, his obsessions, the black-haired woman whispered, “I’m sorry, Vetiver Lawrey. I’m sorry. He never even saw me, do you understand? He saw what he wanted to see—but he made me want to see, too. I wanted to know what I looked like, through his eyes, and I forgot that I should never have seen him in the first place. I never should have come here. It’s not easier, on this side. All I could have done was help him die faster.” Where tears should have brimmed and spilled, as she blinked, the woman’s lashes were beaded with another kind of grief: amber and viscous as sap or honey, and when she wiped at her eyes with slender fingers, streaks like oil gleamed back over her cheekbones.