by Sonya Taaffe
He was gazing up into her face, out of a daydream of bricks corroded to lichen and clay, broken china and mirrors clouded over with tarnish, pieces of a puzzle in the earth and always the sound of the ocean like lost and endless time. Her shoulders were freckled as lightly as confectioner’s sugar. When she smiled, he could see where two of her upper teeth were chipped, relics of a girl who had climbed trees untiringly and not always stayed in them. Nothing like a drowned man’s descendant, this woman he had married, and how many other stories had she never told him? But when he opened his mouth on her name, she closed it again with her own; kissed him so softly at the outer corner of his eye that at first he imagined only her lashes had brushed him. He had given her the keys to the city. She said, “I’ll tell our child, too.”
**
She might still have been changing shape at the edges of his vision, whenever he stared out to sea and the whale-backed horizon; down at his clasped hands, the water churned milky green where he had propped his feet on an inkstone ridge and bladderwrack popped stickily under his heel, tidepools cracked into the salt-glistening rock. They had climbed out over ankle-deep shawls of seaweed, phyllite ledges grained like ancient wood, barnacled as a petrified ship’s timbers, and said little more to one another than watch out, here, all right? Each time she moved, she became someone different, sure-footed and she skidded a little on olive dreadlocks of knotted wrack, one hand cast out as though she could steady herself on the brilliant air, her face lifted into the sun. From one angle and then another, he memorized her, amazed at his own wondering greed, relearning her anew. Child into girl and soon a woman whose name he would not know, time-lapsed in the years he had missed and counted painstakingly as any penitent; still barefoot, she half-knelt beside him and the wind stirred her hair against his sleeve. He would be no more startled to see her transmuted into shreds of Irish moss and abalone, when he looked up, than to see her still watching him.
Under the warm wind that smelled of sun-baked brine and distance, her hair had dried in seal-dark ropes down her back, still wetted to paintbrush points at the tips. Here and there, now that he saw her closer to, stray lines and bones in her face were not so unfamiliar. Quietly, as though she would snap into a stranger again if he disturbed her, Alex asked, “Is this very strange for you?”
“A little.” A lace of tide broke over her fingers, where she braced herself on the blackened rock; she drew her hand back, flicked away droplets in a diffident, glinting arc. When she looked full at him, he tensed his shoulders to hold her gaze. But she admitted, “A lot,” and some of the cold inside his chest unwound; she was human enough still to feel awkward, if little else.
“We can go into town, if you’d prefer. I’d hate to keep you from whatever the land has to offer….”
She shook her head, slowly, so that her hair shifted in the sun. The sky had deepened with afternoon, cerulean as a medieval illumination, the sea’s chartless edges scrolled with warnings—sea serpents, mermaids, kraken; in the distance, a tall ship alongside an oil tanker, the age of sail in alpha and omega. Alex was sweating, but his daughter might have been picked out against those fathoms of air, profiled in scrimshaw, the water-worked inside of a shell, at least until she spoke and altered again. “No. I don’t…. You’re different than I remember. I want to talk with you.”
He did not ask what memory she had come out of the sea to meet; how he measured up to lullabies, picture books, the hundred-letter cryptographies she had climbed up onto his lap to bash out on the Selectric’s ratcheting keys; the last time, he had brought her ice cream, pistachio drip that she had licked off her fingers with solemn, courteous admiration. No uncomplicated gifts in his hands this time; he answered, “I’m as you see me, more or less,” and in return she did not tell him. “I moved out of Boston. I’ve been in Amherst for about three years now. I have joint custody of the apartment with a Tonkinese cat named Winston; I inherited him from a friend who’s in Germany and every time I buy a pot of geraniums to brighten up the place, he eats them. The typewriter’s gone.” The next wave that toppled into the rocks, white over sky-streaked green, spilled up into the laces of his shoes and he grimaced. The facts and fractures of his life, that he could have given her in better order: if he had written them for anyone else to speak. With absent irony, “I have drowned my books.”
If she meant the words in regret, or confirmation, or only curiosity tamped down so cautiously that it became something like pity, he did not think it would have made a difference; his daughter said, “You’re not still writing?” and Alex recognized the choking surge of anger only as it washed out of him, bitter as an aftertaste of brine, the fire that seawater felt like to the lungs of a drowning man. He would not shout at her.
“There’s a university production of The Love Songs of Polyphemos,” he said finally, watching seaweed swirl, rooted, beneath the restless waves, “coming up in the fall. Brandeis, or BC. Something at that end of the alphabet.” He would have taken more pride in his own nonchalance if he had not cared so much that she believe it. His hands were locked over his knee, worn brown corduroy beneath his palms; he made his head tilt in the shrug his shoulders were too stiff for. “And a few weeks back, I had a letter about Parcels from some independent theater in Maine. I might go and see it. No one’s done Polyphemos,” and his voice rocked again, see-saw on itself, “oh, since before you could read…. Tell me you can read.”
Did she know what he sounded like, joking? Her fingers had stilled, twisting at rust-pallid spiral wrack; he felt, himself, as though he had forgotten. All raw edges: nowhere he could rest even a smile without knowing if it would hurt her, as a thousand times driving or dreaming he had imagined he had. A bottle-skinned comber rolled over into itself with a noise like sighing, hit so hard into the ledges that he heard her like an echo. For a numb, silently cursing heartbeat, he thought the words were hers.
“No, does it matter?
If the stars all came out
and said your name in a great chorus together
like sunrise or annunciation
the moment before God came
I wouldn’t listen
Is that what you believe?
I would stop my ears
I would take out my eyes with my own ten fingers
if it meant I could stop hearing your name
I would take out my heart with my own two hands
if it meant you would stop calling after me
because who would love a man
with no heart?
The wind knocks about the place where it used to be
and my empty eyes rattle like losing dice
and all I have are my bloodied hands to hold one another
till the stars die down
Is that what you hear?”
He did not think he was crying, but he had to touch his face to make sure. The dampness that came away on his fingertips was cool as spray, scattered up from the wave that had boomed beneath their feet on the last, hurting line; he swallowed its stony taste on his lips and said huskily, “Where did you learn that?”
Her hair was strung with foam, pearls that ran liquidly away. “I read it.”
“So you can read,” but his mouth would not hold the smile, bent the wrong way to his heart. “Where did— You can’t have—come ashore to see it, did you? It’s in print, but….” He had a sudden romantic’s vision of his daughter in a literary undersea: a wrecked galleon whose sails had gone to seaweed centuries ago, shelves still crammed with logbooks and maps and the leather-rotted, gilt-spined volumes of a gentleman’s library. Amused despite himself, Alex dried his face on his sleeve and let out his breath carefully. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone memorized Polyphemos except graduate students with too much time on their hands. And not even very many of those.”
“It was yours.” Now she looked away, and for the first time she mumbled like a sulky teenager, resentful of what her next words might reveal, or give away unknowing. “I wanted to.”
Of all the things he had to apologize for, and he said before he could stop himself, “I’m sorry.”
“Why? It was something of you.” But she slid down from the grainy rock, on her knees beside the tidepool in its spray-darkened lee: as though maiden’s hair and breadcrumb sponge were an oracle, sky-blue mussels clustered among browsing snails, the litter of shale and shell not yet scoured down to sand as clear beneath the water as under glass. A wave almost caught him as he followed, unraveling over the stone where they had sat; the tide coming in after its own. Without surprise, he heard her whisper, “It hurt to read.”
“It’s not about your mother.”
“I know.”
“The sea-nymph, Galatea….” He pulled one hand through his windblown hair, not too distracted to feel strands come loose between his fingers. Photographs from their marriage had always showed an odd couple, Annata in all her pre-Raphaelite voluptuousness, as tranquil for the camera as a triptych in oils, beside this wild-haired man with a thin, exasperated face, smiling as though he had been embarrassed into it. The mad artist and his muse, or so a stranger would have placed them. “You weren’t even born.”
“I know.”
His daughter reached into the tidepool and mostly to himself, Alex said, “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
For the third time’s charm, “I know,” and he was not sure that she did. Under the rippled water, her skin gleamed like a sand dollar through the clotted green weed, a drowned forest no deeper than her elbow; ringed with reflection where her hair trailed a miniature wake across the surface, threads of sunlight over the tidepool’s bed. There were sea mosses crumpled dark and pale beneath the shelves, patches of lichen in Chinese red. She might fish up anything from this shallow, stranded sea. The kind that likes flowers…. Then water dripped brightly from her fist as she sat back on her heels, and she opened her hand to him like a greater secret than his words, more shyly. Only strands of purple-brown moss in her palm, she said, “The one that got away,” and he smiled for her, still unpracticed and not unfelt.
“Sometimes they come back.”
“Sometimes.” Warily, but she returned the expression—another metamorphosis, sleight of self as the waves shuddered to foam and the tidepool clouded between them, and she reached back to hitch up her shorts that needed a belt on her pale hips. The hollow of her throat was the color of wet pearl. Her fingernails were periwinkles. With only a little hesitation, she corrected herself, “No. They do,” and Alex Marcinko knew her then for her father’s daughter, because she lied as badly as he.
**
The seawalls are falling; we are naked to the winds of time.
—Greer Gilman
**
The same autumn that opened off Broadway, Annata taught part-time at Boston University and Alex bought a new bicycle; the ivy clambered over the fire escape, undying green when all the street’s trees had turned the colors of burning, and their daughter’s favorite word was no. An idyll, in retrospect. At the time, he noticed mostly that the apartment smelled like decaying apples from a bowlful of applesauce that their daughter had contrived to upset into the radiator, that the hand-dyed scarves Annata tied her hair up with were showing snags and smudges from a toddler who liked to play endless, recursive games with the bright swathes of silk, and his face in mirrors looked even more sleepless than usual, cut under the cheekbones with late nights and the bruises he wished would fade—a fare-thee-well from the old bike, when he scraped its front tire into the curb and went head over handlebars onto the pavement of Memorial Drive, winded, his vision starred with pain and the checkerboard branches of plane trees, while traffic screeched and honked behind him. Tell people you were in a brawl, Annata advised unhelpfully. You were defending a little old leading lady from a gang of vicious critics. Too furious with himself for any rest, he limped to the trains and typed with the hand he had landed on, and hoisted up his daughter in the crook of his good arm when she tired on their walks through the park, kicking up dead leaves, chasing the ones that fell. Lately, they were crisped with frost.
In the waning afternoon, the sky had curded up with cloud and the light from over the river was darker than honey. Alex in a raveling, moss-colored cardigan, the sleeves bunched up past his elbows in the heat he had come home to, fogging the windows like an amateur hothouse, felt wryly like his author’s photo in the program, the short interview in the Globe that had compared him to Charles Mee and Ted Hughes, and he had not wanted to confess that he hated Hughes’ translations. They are older and wilder and stranger than the stories we’re taught in school, where each god has a precisely delineated function and a neat little place in the pantheon and the Roman and Greek names are interchangeable. I don’t want them to be familiar to people. I want people to leave feeling not that they’ve checked their reflections in a mirror, but that some déjà-vu stranger’s face has looked back instead…. He tacked out two sentences on the heavy black keys, elbowed his way out of the oversized sweater and threw it over the slat back of his chair, reached for the tea mug he remembered a second later he had already taken into the kitchen; any distraction from the overlapping monologues of Talthybios and Briseis. Through the bedroom doorway, he could see Annata with a sheaf of photocopied papers, her hair bound back experimentally with a dull violet elastic, cross-legged in the chaos of bedding where their daughter dozed. She had put on one of her tapes that Alex always half-heartedly complained were going to ruin their daughter for the classics, tongue-twister punk with skirling guitar and pipes; she never sang audibly outside the shower, but sometimes he caught her lip-synching soundlessly, stealing voices until the song ran out.
He had not realized he was staring; down the book-littered length of two rooms, Annata lifted her head to call softly, “Like what you see?”
“Of course.” The way their daughter stirred slightly at the sound of their voices, her small body dropped bonelessly among the pillows, reminded him of a puppy, or a kitten, some young animal restless in its dreams. He could have gathered them both into his arms and held on so tightly that gravitational forces and chemical bonds would have needed to snap to separate them: the same intensity that startled him each time, the hassles and wonders his life contained. He refused to pin up each new review and mention on the cork board over his desk where buttons and phone numbers and Polaroid snapshots accumulated, the found art of their lives, as though to collect too much certainty in one place was to shout for it all to be dashed on the rocks. He was waiting for the wrong misfortunes to strike. “Madonna and child…I wonder if God was ever jealous.”
“You mean Joseph.”
But he was already shaking his head, alight with apocrypha where the beaches of Troy had frozen for the last week and a half: “No, I mean God. He’s the one who gets all the credit, but Joseph has the family. And you can talk about your heavenly fathers all you want, but it’s still the worldly carpenter whose shoulder you puked up on when you were teething, he’s the man who saw you take your first steps, he’s your father in every way, except genetics, if there is such a thing as spiritual genetics, that counts. He shows you how to plane off wood shavings and not nick your fingers too badly. He’s decided to love you, even if he knows for certain you’re not his and he doesn’t quite know if he believes his wife when she talks about angels. And God has to look down on that, because he doesn’t miss a sparrow’s fall, and the only thing he can give his son is a lonely death on the cross and a promise of the world’s redemption. There’s no bedtime stories in a cup of poison. No car keys to hand down from behind the sky.” Fancifully, because the muse he did not believe in had scared him a little, unable not to picture Annata as the mother of sorrows, the star of the morning, the star of the sea, he said, “The things you miss out on, being incorporeal….”
The brightness in her eyes was not a smile, her gaze sliding from his face to the ambergris light through the curtains. She had laid aside the papers, one hand stilled on their daughter’s fine, darkening hair. This shadow hangin
g over me is no trick of the light. The metallic tick and pop of the radiator, off-rhythm; with the turning of the season, she had begun to complain of the cold for the first time that he could recall. Worried, rising, he said her name, “Annata—” and only Shane MacGowan answered, The dead have come to claim a debt from thee. He wanted to snap back, Shut up! but their daughter was still asleep.
She was not crying, with one hand over her mouth; he had to turn down the stereo before he could hear what she was whispering as voicelessly as all the lyrics to Rain Dogs or Lionheart. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Alex, I’m sorry….” He could nearly fold both of her hands into one of his own, long-fingered, knuckly, still stiff with sprain, but she did not let him; her hand fastened on his shirtsleeve instead. Of all the blankets she had heaped onto their bed in the last few weeks, she had wrapped herself in the heavy patchwork quilt he had dragged through every dorm room of his student life, so antique with washing that one denim stripe was indistinguishable from another calico quarrel. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said. Fiercely, so that he could not mistake her, “I don’t ever want to lose you.”
“You don’t have to.” He did not dare tease her; he let her pull him down until he was half-kneeling beside her on the sagging mattress, the fever heat from her fingers and her face pressed into his midriff with a cat’s brief, shying possessiveness, enough that he could have warmed himself in her arms no matter how she shivered. “Hey, love. Hey. No one’s going anywhere.” Soothing her, as he might have hushed back to sleep their daughter who had uncurled crankily into waking, not too young to miss her parents’ tense, quiet voices, her mother’s hand withdrawn; digging his fingers into her coin-colored hair, kneading the unfreckled nape of her neck; immensely, unreasonably weary, as trapped as he had felt tender the moment before. So the herald Talthybios might have eyed Kassandra, smoldering with time to come as fire through the ruins of her royal house. Poor as I am, I would never have sought this woman to bed. He wanted out of the inside of his own head; he muttered, “Well, all right, I might throw myself off the fire escape if I can’t get these revisions in on time,” and Annata’s shoulders jerked with a sudden snort of laughter, muffled against the buttons of his shirt. “What, you think it’s funny if your husband commits suicide? I’m dying for my art, and all you can do is snicker at me? Laugh it up at the funeral, why don’t you—” However blackly, he harried himself into good humor as much as her, until their daughter was hiccupping with laughter, shouting, No! and Again! and Alex sprawled back across the bed, panting. “Crazy,” Annata said peacefully, her daughter in her lap, her husband’s arm around her waist. Her eyes in shadow were ale-dark, half-closed. “All of us. Crazy.”
