The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

“I’ll just need to get the axe and saw.”

  We passed through the store of firewood, the muted light, the cold cottony smell of the wood. They made no sign of dropping behind. They expected to come in. To leave them in the garage would have been cruel.

  “We’ll just go into the mudroom,” I said.

  But as we stepped inside, the soiled musk of dead mouse unmistakable in the walls, the telephone began to ring. It hadn’t rung in weeks. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to sound routine. I opened the door to the house, tracked snow past the woodstove, picked up the phone. “Hello.”

  “You were out walking?”

  The voice sounded parched and small. “Yes. How are you, Lev?”

  “And you have shoveled the roof? And cleaned the chimney?”

  “Yes,” I said, answering the first question, not the second. “How are you?”

  “Not so great. I make this brief—the long-distance rates, you don’t believe.” I could see him running his hand through his thinning red hair, the wind hot on the windowpane of some unkempt apartment.

  “What is it?”

  “Grossman left. He is also in the department. Was. Was in the department. So we have few options for next year. I must stay in Tel Aviv. It is not so bad here. But the house. I dream last night of coming back to animals. You know this Bear Jamboree?”

  I had to think. “At Disney World?”

  “Yes, it is horribly fake. Horribly American, if you excuse me. But I dream of coming back and there is the bear jamboree. Inside my house. The bears playing instruments. You can stay? Same agreement. No rent. Only wood and electricity. This is acceptable?”

  Bella and Linda were bickering in the mudroom like they were back in the kitchen at the café. I carried the phone away from the woodstove, closer to the window. “I’ll have to think about it, Lev.”

  “The department meeting is soon. They need an answer.”

  I tried to imagine another winter. Outside, a fringe of birch bark tattered in the wind. The trees were so still. All I could see was quiet. But it came more easily than imagining the alternative. The loneliness would be bad, but anything else would be worse. Back in Boston, I couldn’t see myself, couldn’t see anything. The curtain of my mind wouldn’t open.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good! Very good! Excellent! I go now. We talk in another week. Good-bye!”

  Out the long windows to the woods, the land around the house felt vast, suddenly expanded. I could hear Bella and Linda in the mudroom, but their voices had gone farther away. This was becoming my life. The stillness of the days. The long quiet of the nights. The fire in the woodstove. This was becoming who I was. And the only thing that disturbed me was how natural it felt: the voice that should have been raging against staying—What are you thinking? Remember the boy in the bus!—had drifted farther away, too.

  I returned to the mudroom, gathered the axe and the hacksaw, and we headed outside into the cold. I was relieved to have Bella and Linda with me, relieved to see the eagerness, however sobered, still in their faces. Maybe I could learn to bring them into my life here—maybe I could move one step in from the periphery of the periphery. Maybe I’d even cook them dinner one night. I had a fleeting image of myself running a Christmas tree farm—an article in the Newport Chronicle about the young Jew who sells trees.

  “Look, can you imagine?” Bella said, pointing towards the tallest spruce. “You’d need scaffolding!”

  “And a house without a roof,” Linda said.

  I could feel the weight of the axe on my shoulder. It was heavier than I’d expected. The hacksaw was badly rusted, orange corroding the sharp teeth, but the axe might do the trick. “You said a sapling, right?”

  “Of course. Nothing much taller than Bella.”

  “Do you think it will still smell like the woods?” Bella said.

  Linda looked at me hopefully.

  “It should,” I said, unsure if I was playing expert or father, but not too keen on either role.

  They chose a pine sapling not far from the apple trees. It wasn’t very robust, some threadbare gaps towards the top, but it would do. The axe was terribly dull. I got through the bark, the pulp white as an exposed shin, but my hands were turning raw.

  “Can I have a go?” Bella asked. “Just a swing or two?”

  I looked at Linda. Her face was open—she was far too ready to defer to my judgment. This short trip, this standing around in the cold, was probably the closest she’d come to a vacation in months. Her trust made me uneasy, but I handed Bella the axe.

  She swung, missed, swung again. The thin top branches shivered with the blow. She’d probably never taken a gym class, never played a sport, and her body was wild with untrained energy. Her cheeks flushed red, her hair whipped around her face. The axe kept corkscrewing her around, until it looked like she might hit her own leg.

  Feeling disturbingly paternal, I told them the axe was too dull, which it likely was, and took up the hacksaw and cut through the slender trunk. We drove back to town with the windows open, taking the turns very slowly, each of us with one arm on a branch, the tree shifting side to side on the roof. Linda directed me. They lived about a quarter-mile behind the café, on a street with very modest houses, narrow driveways between them. A few wreaths on the doors, no Christmas light displays, no plastic reindeer out front.

  “This has been very kind of you,” Linda said, her hands already in the tree’s branches. “You must need to get going.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  “We can manage,” she said glancing behind her towards the house. “Thank you very much.”

  “Mom, let him help,” Bella said.

  Linda wouldn’t look at me.

  “Let me help.”

  “Oh, very well then, but keep your eyes closed. I haven’t tidied. Really, you must understand.”

  We small-stepped our way inside with the tree, and though I was trying not to look at anything, the smell hit me hard. The tiny kitchen reeked of cat litter and what I could only guess was Mr. Kipling. The house was as cold as the café. Newspapers littered almost every surface. It was worse than I’d imagined. Linda began bustling about, clearing a space, searching for the box of lights, apologizing. Mr. Kipling began to whistle and chirrup from his cage like a video game on the fritz.

  “Thank you, thank you so much for your help,” Linda said. “Could I offer you a drink of some kind?”

  She was as uncomfortable as I would have been with them in my kitchen. A thin gray cat was pawing at a green string of lights.

  “I really should get going. It was a lot of fun.”

  She shook my hand, smiled in pained way, raised her hand to her hair. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  Bella followed me outside onto the front step, holding the screen door open. Her face had gone quiet. This was her house behind her, and she suddenly looked very shy. The bird let out a tremendous whistle from the kitchen.

  “Mum does the best she can.”

  “I know she does.”

  I could feel the empty house waiting in the woods, the fire burnt down, the long months ahead. I needed to turn and leave, but my feet felt heavy.

  “Do you think you’ll go to college next year?”

  “Depends on Mum. On the café. But I hope so. All those zygotes have to go somewhere, right?”

  “Sure do.”

  “And not just in my thoughts.”

  A light breeze lifted at her hair. I had a sudden urge to escape with her, to drive north and to keep on driving. I pictured a roadside motel, a diner. We could join up with a circus; we could find work. She was so young, I could basically invent her, and invent myself in her eyes—we could probably stretch it until summer before it collapsed. Then there would be the conversations, the letters. The time to show my compassion.

  The swiftness of the calculations was awful.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  She stepped back inside he
r house, let the screen door close. But before closing the inner door, she held up one hand to the glass pane. She held it waist-high, lightly, as though she were just reassuring herself that the glass existed. Maybe she was being dramatic again, but something about it moved me terribly.

  I drove slowly back through town, then up into the woods. Dusk had fallen. The dark beyond the farmhouse didn’t feel heavy, so much as something that could rise up and swallow a man. The yellow cone of light from the headlights was a thin protection. The trees were so bright inside the light, so dark beyond. It felt like other people had once been in these woods, but now they had disappeared.

  The week after the party, I found myself taking more walks than usual, examining faces more closely beneath the porticoes on Via Irnerio. Wherever I went, Milena’s presence felt close to me, as though I was perpetually on the verge of seeing her. Even inside the apartment, I found myself getting up from my desk at odd times, poking my head out into the stairwell, listening for footsteps or a voice. I wondered if I would recognize her voice—I couldn’t remember it exactly, only the smoothness of it, the way it seemed not to interrupt the moonlight. I told myself to calm down, not to be such a daydreamer, but the feeling I’d had when we were on the roof kept coming over me, stealing between me and whatever I was trying to write. It was like distant music, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, and it stole into every gap in my day—at breakfast over my cereal, on my walks down Via Zamboni, in the evening as I came out of the shower. It was always waiting, and I desperately hoped it would turn into more than just music. I’d never felt anything like it. It seemed too persistent, too beautiful not to come closer and take form.

  Juan Ignacio told me she lived upstairs, but just coming out of our apartment and looking up the drafty stairs made my heart hammer in my chest. Besides, what had started between us had started in a way that didn’t follow any conventions, and I felt almost superstitious about letting it continue that way. Usually, if I liked a girl and there were signs she liked me, I was able to ask her out without hesitation. But this was entirely different. Nothing from my past seemed to apply. Since the eye accident, I hadn’t had a girlfriend. Senior year, I’d dated more than ever before, but that just meant staying one step ahead of intimacy, a kind of musical chairs, so I’d never have to face myself or a woman when the music stopped. But what I’d felt on the rooftop with Milena had connected with a longing that frightened me in its intensity. Perhaps it had always been there, but it had become palpable only since the accident. I didn’t know what it was made of exactly, but it had something to do with that gap between what was behind my eyes and what was outside them, and with the need to be with a woman who could make contact with both, who could make each realm as real as the other.

  But as the March days wore on, and as I ate lunch with Juan Ignacio trying to pay attention to his rhapsodies about Italian women, my doubts began to grow. Had I misread our conversation? Had that softness in her eyes not been for me but just for something she was remembering about herself, that teenager in her grandmother’s garden? The possibility made it difficult to eat. I’d been so certain when we said good-bye that we’d see each other again. But a week had passed. Sometimes, staring out my window late in the day, the shadows of the porticoes slanting long in the street, I knew she’d felt it, knew we’d both felt it moving below us. Maybe it had scared her for some reason. Maybe I had to go find her. But then I’d remember the two men she’d been dancing with and my stomach would catch. Maybe every man fell in love with her a little. Maybe she was out of my league. Maybe our rooftop conversation had been just a pleasant diversion for her, a minor perk in her evening.

  But whatever I told myself, however I tried to slow my heart, the distant music kept on playing. Reading at night on my mattress, I came across a beautiful passage in All the Pretty Horses, and I imagined reading it to her, imagined how she would enjoy it. When I ate at the stand-up pizzeria on Via Irnerio, I thought of bringing her there, not to eat but just to introduce her to the stout pizza lady who called me Caro and always asked if I had a girl. Strangely, I was more aware of what I enjoyed—just having Milena in my thoughts somehow made my life more worthwhile, justified it in a way. My days at my desk, my afternoons walking the city, took on meaning in what I imagined to be her eyes.

  But now nearly two weeks had passed since the party, and still I hadn’t seen her. I steeled my courage, put on my blue button-down, the one I thought made my eyes look best, and started up the stairs. It was just dusk, not too late to go calling on her, whatever that meant, and I hit the glowing switch in the stairwell to turn on the light. I tried to clear my head, to think what I might say, and I told myself not to say too much. But as I rounded the landing between our floors, there she was.

  “It is you,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I am just coming to knock on your door. It is this floor?”

  “One floor down,” I said. My voice had turned into a bird that might or might not be trained.

  “But you are here?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “You are friends with them?” She pointed to the door.

  “I was coming to see you.”

  “But I am upstairs.”

  “I was on my way up.”

  “This is strange.”

  “Yes.” What we were saying wasn’t what we were saying.

  She looked down at her feet for a moment. “You like to bicycle?”

  “I don’t have one here.”

  “But I borrow you one. Tomorrow we ride into the hills and make a picnic. I have no classes. You are free? The weather is good.”

  Everything waiting on my desk, everything I’d been hoping to finish the following day, didn’t matter anymore.

  “We leave in the morning. You have an appointment or so?”

  The stairwell light buzzed off. It was on a timer. For a moment, I couldn’t see her. Slowly the stairs appeared again, the shadow of the elevator grate. She was in silhouette. She rested her hand by the small orange glow on the wall, but did not press the switch.

  “It is beautiful in the hills,” she whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “You will like it. You come?”

  The main door opened downstairs. The light buzzed on. I squinted, took a step back. We had been standing very close.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. Now I must go.”

  She turned and went nimbly up the stairs. I listened as her footsteps faded above me. I listened until there was nothing more to listen to.

  The moonlight made it impossible to sleep. It washed over the window ledge and turned the floorboards and blanket ghostly white. The snow had stopped, at least for the moment, but it carried into the room with the moonlight, as though the whole room were being buried in transparent snow. It was probably two or three in the morning, but I pulled on my snowpants, my wool sweater, and climbed up to the roof. There was a wood panel at the top of the stairs—you just had to duck your head and push hard with your shoulders—and it opened into a small square room with no heat, windows on all sides, a kind of look-out tower. The windows were opaque with frost. I picked up the shovel and wedged my way out the door, the snow waist-high. The night was astonishing. The air so clean, the tang of woodsmoke from the chimney. The sky soft and oceanic, with a few thin archipelagoes of clouds. The stars didn’t shimmer as austerely as against a black sky, but they seemed more at ease. The snow in front of the house was so blue, so luminous, it looked lit from below. I began shoveling, careful not to nick the tar-paper roof, stopping every now and then to look out at the woods. The snow on the trees glittered wildly, every movement of my eye returned by millions of flecked blue shimmers. The night was so quiet. The moon was watching, and the stars were watching, and the snow slid off the edge of the roof and landed quietly on the snow below. Each time I stopped to join in the watching, I had the feeling I was showing the night’s beauty to someone else, sharing it with someone who understood. I sho
veled the full perimeter of the roof, a thin sweat beneath my clothes. When I turned to luxuriate in the night once more, I felt a presence behind me, a hand reaching for my hand.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.

  I could feel her breathing. I could feel the touch of her hand through my glove. We looked out at the strange illuminated night, at the lunar peace of it all. There was too much beauty to be able to breathe it in alone. I didn’t need to turn, didn’t need to see her face.

  A chill caught me from behind, the hairs at the back of my neck prickled. Without any movement, the trees seemed to go naked, the night’s enchantment dissolved. Again, every star, every tree, was just survival. Everything was fighting for itself. The chill stole the air from my chest, invaded my lungs. There was no one beside me. I knew I was alone.

  She rode ahead of me, opening the cool Bologna morning as she went. The sky was clear blue and we rode past the women window-shopping beneath the porticoes, past the short line at the La Repubblica newspaper stand, past the man from the motorcycle store out in his purple jumpsuit, then left onto Via Indipendenza, her hand signaling and nearly touching an orange city bus sweeping its turn beside her, two boys in the window pointing and smiling, then the bus pulled ahead, and the street opened to its full size: banners draped above the broad avenue with announcements I didn’t try to understand, the porticoes extending in classic perspective all the way down to Piazza Maggiore. Milena glanced back, said something I didn’t catch. Then she rode standing again, speeding forward towards the hills as though pulled by a magnetic force. I pedaled hard to keep pace, forgetting everything but the sunlight opening on the high walls of the apartment buildings and the ease of the invitation. It had all been so simple.

  As we came into Piazza Maggiore, a man’s voice was spreading through the open square over a loudspeaker. We were riding side by side now, past the Neptune statue with its shooting fonts, past the city hall that looked like the keel of an old ship, and towards a small crowd gathered by the steps of the church. Beyond the church the street was cobblestoned, no porticoes, and soon we were on the outskirts of the city. Even now, as we rode, it was still going on. I’d felt it during her invitation on the stairwell and as we packed our picnic shoulder to shoulder in my kitchen. It had been more than two weeks since our conversation on the roof, but the conversation had never stopped. It had gone on without us. I told myself that was all it was, all I needed it to be—a conversation, a hum, a hue in the air. Slowly, I told myself, whatever happened, I would proceed slowly, and just let the feeling unfurl.