The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  “You don’t have pizza by the slice, do you?”

  “We do have pizza! Bella,” she called to the kitchen, her eyes still on me, “put the pizza oven on!”

  “Yes, Mother!” a voice cried back.

  “Now what kind would you like?”

  I ordered a small cheese pizza and a Coke, which felt like a tremendous indulgence. It would come to $6.25, including tax.

  “Very good,” the woman said. “Bella,” she called. “Do come out and say hello!” It was as though I had come calling and presented my card. The kitchen door swung open and a very tall girl with sparkling silver hair came out.

  “Do take that off.”

  The girl reached up to her head. “I forgot,” she said. She pulled the wig from her head, revealing a lush tangle of blonde hair. It was clear she had preferred the wig.

  “This is Bella, my daughter,” the woman said.

  I said hello.

  The girl, who was probably six feet tall and no more than seventeen years old, curtsied theatrically, flashing a fake smile at her mother. Her body was ungainly, unformed, it seemed, by movies, by magazines, by any sense of the shape she was supposed to fit into, her hips up to her ears. But her face had the startling beauty of a Renaissance madonna.

  “And I’m Linda,” the woman said, extending her hand. Her grip was shockingly strong. “Your pizza shouldn’t be long.”

  The room settled back into subterranean murk. I took off my jacket. I was relieved by the proprietress and her daughter—they seemed almost as peripheral to the town as I was. No gossipy waitress interviewing me about my doings in these parts. No short-order cook giving me the stink eye through his window. This café was just what I needed. To see people without the threat of being seen. To be able to sit somewhere public without having to situate myself in any public way. It was like a scrimmage, a dry run. Being with people without being with too many people.

  Besides, it was pleasant to be sitting somewhere that wasn’t the house—to be out on the town. And it was doubly pleasant to be somewhere communal that was quiet. In the C&C, I struggled not to be overwhelmed by the top 40 radio station playing from the market’s overhead speakers. At the house there was no reason to dim my hearing. There was no sound that wasn’t useful. I wanted to hear the fire—to know from the wind-rush and the popping if it was burning too hot—and to hear the birds—for their song and their company—and to hear anything, even if it was just a squirrel, that was approaching in the woods. My hearing had never been more acute or more necessary. But at the entrance to the C&C, when Elton John surrounded me between the sets of automatic doors, I felt as though a carnival ride were whisking me off the ground. I clutched the chilled handle of the shopping cart, did my best to keep a measured pace into the frozen foods, but inside me a roller coaster filled with teenagers sped and plunged, their hair flying straight up in the wind. LA, la, la, la, la, LA! “Crocodile Rock” bounced beneath the Elio’s pizza boxes, making the freckled girl on the pink package of ice cream cones smile, loosening up the Jolly Green Giant in his green singlet of leaves. It bounced under the very tile of the aisles, and I didn’t understand how the slowly trolling matrons in housecoats weren’t all feeling it too. I avoided their eyes, tried to behave as though I was in a library, but as the song ended, and the prospect of quiet marketing returned, there was Whitney Houston, desperate to dance with somebody—with SomeBody WHO, SomeBody WHO—and the wild-eyed cartoon rabbits and neon-colored birds on the cereal boxes looked as though they wanted to jump down from their cardboard warrens and nests and twirl with her down the aisle. The music was sugar in my veins. I caught myself tapping my thumbs on the shopping cart, smiling like a madman. Plus, there were the jingles and commercials sweeping off the boxes and jars as I walked past—Choosey Moms Choose Jif, Have a Coke and a Smile, Help Yourself to Stouffer’s Pizza. Each product seemed designed for customers who couldn’t see very well, the words and colors like the orange semaphores used to guide a plane. It all fizzed together to make me feel like I was traveling through a parallel land, something like Oz, only more familiar because it was the America I’d grown up with. Swiss Miss, Aunt Jemima, Count Chocula, the Sun Maid! They were all garishly reassuring—welcoming me back to their version of reality, which I was still invited to as long as I had a bit of cash. When I made it back to the house, a party would still be buzzing inside me. As I unpacked the groceries, Elton John and Whitney Houston would come tumbling back out, as though from a music box, down to which lyrics had carried me through which aisles. The Stouffer’s pizza was still broadcasting: Oh lawdy mama, those Friday nights, when Suzie wore her dresses tight. The box of Life cereal: with somebody WHO, somebody WHO. The food somehow contained the songs, which themselves contained a map of my progress through the store. My senses were so open, my attention so available, that I’d absorbed it all without trying. Maybe my brain was still adapting, joining my vision and hearing together, somehow making everything easier to remember. Or maybe I was just starved for stimulation. Or maybe some primal instinct for map making, for orientation, had returned.

  Anyway, it was pleasant now just to sit in the restaurant’s quiet. After some harried discussion from the kitchen I couldn’t quite decipher, the tall girl came back with my glass of Coke. She set it down on the table. She hovered. To be so close to another person without words felt dangerous.

  “You go to the regional high school?” I said.

  “Mom homeschools me. Homeschools, that’s a verb. We run the gamut. Even biology, which I loathe, but I suppose cells are people too. Or something like that. Our curriculum is really quite comprehensive.”

  “It sounds it.”

  “Yesterday, for instance, I was reading about zygotes. Do you know about zygotes? Do people walk down the street with thoughts of zygotes running through their heads? I certainly hope not. But I wonder. What if I’m the only one walking down the street with thoughts of zygotes? You know? Wouldn’t that be peculiar?”

  I considered. “Or with thoughts about those thoughts.”

  Her eyes brightened. “Yes, exactly! Which probably makes me more peculiar still!”

  “Or maybe just the opposite.”

  “Maybe. Would you like to see me juggle? I’ve been practicing.”

  She ran off to the kitchen. I took a long sip from my Coke. It was strangely exhilarating to be talking with another human being—and at such speed. I was doing well! It felt like playing a sport—the movement, the unpredictability. The way each response depended on the last, the way you carried each other forward, the way the words had a direction but could swoop and shift, like birds playing in the air. I’d forgotten the thrill. Did people really do this all the time—minute after minute, hour after hour?

  I told myself to be careful. She was so young. Which was reason enough. Besides, I knew from my years on the road my propensity for shifting my attention to a woman, letting my reflection in her eyes stand in for what I was searching for, tending to her wounds so I could run from my own. It was a bad song on repeat after my return from Italy. It happened in New Mexico with Ani, then in Arizona with Jillian, then in Montana with Melissa. Thinking myself a kind, genuinely interested fellow, I heard their stories and then had their ankles around my ears. And then I left. With an earnest good-bye, with an explanation about needing to go on searching, but what did it matter? Their letters, which I’d receive months later back in Boston, made a collection. The walk along the river ... the hike through the canyon … the rain … the sun.… why are you so guarded? … you give with one hand, take away with the other ... no, I understand perfectly what you were saying, what you were saying is that you’re an asshole. Which is part of why I’d come to Vermont and moved into solitude, so I couldn’t hurt or hide in anyone, so I couldn’t go on stalling with some disposable version of myself. Whatever I was going to find, however I was going to get my bearings, I didn’t want it to be in relation to anything that wasn’t permanent—I didn’t want it to be relative. I needed to f
ind something that couldn’t be taken away and that I couldn’t leave.

  She was wearing her silver wig. All hips and elbows and overeagerness. It almost made me feel safe—she was so young. “I’ll just start with three, but I can work my way up to five.” The beanbags started flying.

  “Bella!”

  “I must away,” she said, setting the beanbags on the table as though I might want to try them for myself. They were made of blue denim and patches from a red bandanna. I didn’t touch them. I knew from my nights by the woodstove how dangerous even the most basic fantasies could be. The space inside me was too large, the stage in my mind too vacant. The images would get away from me and start following their own currents, just like dreams.

  The mother burst through the swinging door. I realized I’d been holding one of the beanbags and hurriedly put it back on the table. She scooped them up, deposited them in her apron, and set down the pizza. The steam rose luxuriously off the cheese.

  “Buon appetito!” she said.

  A negative space of fireworks was beginning in my mouth.

  “I hope she didn’t juggle your ear off.”

  “Not at all.”

  “She’s really a very intelligent girl. She just lacks company.” She rested her hand on the back of the chair opposite me.

  “Understandable.”

  “Right, well.”

  She wasn’t returning to the kitchen. She was contemplating the chair. To my surprise, I kind of wanted her to sit—but I didn’t want to want her to sit, didn’t want to trade stories of how we came to be in this town, didn’t want to reassure her about her daughter and begin some sideways seduction, didn’t want to get involved.

  “The pizza’s very good.”

  “Splendid, thank you!” She clapped her hands together. “Well, we certainly hope you’ll come back and see us again soon. You live here in Barton?”

  “Close by.”

  She waited, but I didn’t elaborate. “Excellent. I’ll leave you to your food.”

  I was able to manage only two small slices, half the Coke. I was surprised I couldn’t eat more. My stomach had probably shrunk. As I zipped up my coat to leave, the two of them hovered by the kitchen door. “Ciao, signore,” Bella said.

  “Ciao, tutti.”

  “But you speak Italian?” the mother said.

  I was sorry for it. “Yes.”

  “Ah! La prossima volta, parliamo italiano!”

  Now they both looked at me far too openly, mother and daughter, their faces a harmony of hungers. I looked down at my box of leftovers. I was ashamed of how much their loneliness pulled on me, how ready they would be to tell their stories, and how ready I would be to listen, and to listen, and to listen.

  My fellowship in Italy had only two stipulations: not to enroll in any formal plan of study and not to marry. The Rockefeller was designed for “a journey of adventure and discovery at a vulnerable and pivotal time in one’s life,” and apparently marrying or studying would interfere. Tie me to the mast—I was pretty sure I could handle it. I rented a room in a house in the hills outside Bologna. My window looked out on a vineyard, which sloped down towards a two-lane road, and across the road the hills rose in a patchwork of fields—some smooth and green, some striped with the slender rows of grapevines, some just clumped earth from which dust would rise up in the wind. Horses, the size of my thumbnail from the window above my desk, would appear in the afternoon. Long heads lowered to the land, something strangely elemental and hieroglyphic about their four legs walking. At the base of the hills, the road billowed in slow curves, following the narrow stream that ran through the valley.

  I sat at my makeshift desk—an old door, with a missing doorknob, over two sawhorses—considering for the first time what I might have to say and how I might say it. I had begun reading fiercely, unabashedly, trying to figure out how I might write a novel. There was no one to hide my reading habit from anymore, no one I saw on a daily basis, no one for whom I was supposed to play a role. My landlord didn’t care what I did in my room as long as I was quiet and paid my rent. She’d leave a pot of rabbit stew for me on the stove; she’d make toast every morning promptly at eight, whether I wanted to eat it or not. She was in her midforties, attractive, utterly uninterested in discussion. Cooking, she said, was part of the rent—but not company. I rarely saw her. Occasionally, I’d notice I’d lost a whole day to a book; even when I stepped outside for a walk, I was still having conversations with the characters in my mind. It was the first period in my life when my thoughts had full license to expand. Nothing going on inside me had to be tamed—I didn’t see people, didn’t have to organize myself into a person for anyone’s eyes. The books piled up haphazardly on my nightstand. Rabbit Run, Van Gogh’s Letters to Theo, Il Cavaliere Inesistente, The Collected Chekhov, A Farewell to Arms—anything I could find on my landlady’s bookshelf in English or Italian. I began recording passages in the journal Mom and Dad had bought me for the trip. Such sweet heresy! It had an old-fashioned sun on the cover, a face with rays shooting out in all directions, but it looked to me like a boy with his face pressed to the porthole of a ship. My hope was that the quotations accumulating on the pages behind his eyes would eventually give way to the words behind my own. I wasn’t dreaming of best sellers. But I did imagine finding the shape of the world again beneath my pen; I did imagine being able to tell fellow readers how I saw. Which meant, really, I was imagining being less alone.

  Day after day, I’d stare out at the neat rows of grapevines, then at my own tangle of words, then back at the grapevines. The room really did look like the room of a writer. The notes by the computer, the stack of books by the bed. I’d sold the Rockefeller committee on having a unique perspective, on seeing behind the façade of daily life. But to have a perspective you needed to be seeing from somewhere, to be located, and I didn’t feel located at all. I didn’t belong to any place. I’d go for long walks. I’d get up to use the bathroom when I didn’t have to. Maybe if I read just one more novel, looked up a few more words in the enormous English dictionary in the hall. I was a twenty-two-year-old who needed to be starting in the mailroom, and I’d found myself in the corner office, painfully aware I didn’t deserve to be there.

  Ilaria, my landlord, hardly blinked when I told her I was moving down into Bologna. Devoting all my energies to being less alone had, in fact, only made me lonelier—and I needed to spend more time with people. I didn’t really need to explain; loneliness was something she could understand. Her husband, a dentist, was having an affair with a university student and had moved out months before my arrival. He had isolated her, she said, here in the hills. Isolata—the word from isola, meaning island. She had a mole just to the side of her mouth, her dark eyes somewhere between alluring and haggard. Every afternoon her tiny red Alfa Romeo would escape down the dusty hillside between the rows of grapes, a cloud of dust trailing behind it. What she did on her outings in Bologna I never knew: maybe she had a lover, maybe she shoplifted the lipsticks she expertly applied while she drove, maybe she watched movies, one after the next, sitting in the dark. We were in her car, driving to the market in town, when I told her. It was January, the air had grown chill. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and sat very straight. I knew she needed the rent money, but she said nothing. Something about her calmness suddenly made me think she did spy on her husband, that she followed him beneath porticoes, waited for him outside apartments. At the very least, it was clear that whatever bitterness brought the bright edge to her eyes, she had once been very much in love.

  “Go the city,” she said. “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “You want love,” she said. “You want to know your heart. You can only find this with another person, no?”

  Not far past the buried stone wall, by the intertwined birches that arched over the trail, I stopped to listen. Two chickadees were singing back and forth, a two-note song, slow and plaintive: Fee-bee. Fee-bee. In between the calls, there was just silence,
the sound of my own breathing. The calls seemed to hang the woods like an enormous tapestry, to stretch the air and the trees to their proper proportions. But I couldn’t see the birds. At each note, my eyes climbed branch after branch, scurrying higher up, farther back, but there was only the intricate white latticework of the branches. The song went again. Fee-bee. Fee-bee. But I saw nothing.

  They had been my best neighbors all fall, a rare flash of movement among the leaves, little black and white sparks more curious than the squirrels. On the dirt road, a flying fist would follow me, its jumpy flight pattern so close I could hear the thrum of its wings—the rise, after every floating dip, fired by a wing burst, a tiny fusillade of flight. When I stopped, a chickadee would suddenly alight on a nearby branch and wait, its small round black head, with the racy white bank-robber’s mask, adjusting left, adjusting right, a charade of curiosity. Oh, really? Really? it seemed to say. The more I encountered them on my walks, the easier it was to understand Native American legends of coyote or fox—each black-capped chickadee a particular companion but also becoming a part of the idea of chickadee, some playful and intrepid winter spirit of the woods. I couldn’t help liking them. To walk the road, even when no chickadee appeared, was to feel its company, to remember the small, inquisitive face from the day before. It was my court jester, my Northeast Kingdom little fool. But now, for whatever reason, the chickadee was done showing itself. The white mask had slid off its face, expanded, and become the entire snowy woods.

  I jammed my poles in the snow. Damn little birds. My encounter at the café was still humming inside me, and I wondered if that’s why I couldn’t see. The girl juggling in her silver wig, the mother’s hand on the back of the chair, the way they looked at me as I left. It was one thing at the C&C to stand close to the cashier—usually it took an afternoon to settle back into the visual quiet of the woods, to stop having flashes of spiky eyelashes and the colorful array of foods—but something deeper had been stirred up this time, a readiness I’d forgotten about, and it seemed a grave weakness, something that could lead to a derailment of why I’d come to the woods. I felt like the second monk in the famous story about the woman crossing the muddy road. The first monk picks her up and carries her across the mud, so her kimono won’t get stained, but the second monk becomes greatly agitated as the two monks continue on their way, “Why did you do that? You have betrayed our oath!” The first replies, “I put her down on the far side of the road, but you are still carrying her.” It’s not that I thought of myself as a monk, but if I was going to be like one of the monks in the story, I at least wanted to be the virtuous one—the one pure of mind rather than pure of deed, the one who follows the spirit of the law rather than the letter. And the spirit of my own law meant that I wasn’t supposed to think about anyone in town, wasn’t supposed to think about any kind of relationship. It would be an easy way out, a shortcut to identity, a way of making myself feel good that I wasn’t ready for and didn’t deserve. I worried I was still carrying the mother and daughter with me. And the woods seemed to agree. They weren’t taking me back so quickly.