Dying Unfinished

by Espinosa, Maria

  “Yes,” she muttered. “It shouldn’t bother me. But it does.”

  “Why shouldn’t it?

  “A small hollow in a woman’s body. A man’s cock. A bit of fluid …”

  “Which can create life.”

  “She’s young and fertile. I’m not.”

  “Nor am I,” said Heinrich. “I can’t have children either.”

  Although she wondered why, she didn’t ask. Instead she murmured, “Erica’s is so beautiful. She’s a wonderful wife.”

  He tilted her face up. “You’re beautiful in my eyes.”

  “She loves you.”

  “I imagine you love Aaron. Sometimes it’s impossible for one person to fill our needs. You have a quality—something inside you, El—that releases Aaron’s artistic strength.” He pulled her down onto the narrow maid’s bed with its lumpy springs. It was covered with a faded green spread. The room was very dusty, and Eleanor sneezed. To her embarrassment, a huge glob of snot fell onto the back of her hand.

  He calmly took a pressed handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and wiped it off.

  “Oh, my God, I’m sorry …”

  He cut off her words with a kiss, stuffing the used handkerchief into a back pocket of his trousers. Then his tongue, thick and salty, wove into her mouth. She had never kissed anyone for so long, never held anyone close for so long. His hands were soothing, warm and strong, she felt herself melting. When the stairs creaked, she pulled away. But there were no more sounds. It just was the house settling, or perhaps a spirit making its presence felt.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “I saw one once,” he said. “I was alone in the apartment. A man in a brown suit appeared in the hallway. He walked through—I could hear his footsteps—and then he disappeared, like smoke.”

  “How strange,” she said. She told him about the night she felt Frank’s presence. It was the first time she’d talked about it to anyone.

  He smoothed her hair with great gentleness.

  She wept with sadness, joy, desire, all mingled together.

  “Eleanor, do you think you could love me?”

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  That was how their affair began. They shared an appreciation of Baroque music, Donne, and Rilke; they laughed at the same jokes. Often they spoke in French or German, if the words were more apt than English. With him, she felt like a flower, opening under warm sunlight. His kindness and compassion seduced her as much as his body. He perceived the self she feared she had lost. He restored her to wholeness.

  He had a slower, deeper rhythm than Aaron’s. When Eleanor was with him, it seemed as if her very cells relaxed. They were both intuitives, mystics underneath. They understood things in a flash that would have made no sense to Erica and Aaron with their strictly rational beliefs.

  Yet she and Aaron were bound to each other. And what about the children? She could not abandon them. If she lived with Heinrich, she feared he would demand her total attention, as if he, too, were a child.

  Over the years the couples grew even closer. Eleanor wondered how she and Heinrich managed such formidable deceit. Were their spouses really so blind? Evidently they did not want to see. 1n fact, after she became involved with Heinrich, Aaron seemed to desire her more.

  CHAPTER 16

  SUBURBAN INTERLUDE

  Rosa once asked her mother, “What is love?”

  Eleanor thought of Heinrich, of Aaron, of anonymous hands wandering over her body. Hands became billowing clouds. Both question and answer faded as she noticed with particular clarity the green shade of the watercolor on the wall.

  Nineteenth century fantasy: she was naked in the woods with two fully clothed gentlemen, as in the famous painting by Monet.

  “Will I ever find love?” she asked.

  “When you’re ready,” said Eleanor, looking at Rosa. Eleanor opened the oven door and slid in a pan of chicken to roast.

  “Sometimes I think I’ve lived other lives. When I was younger, I used to think I had been a holy man in India who sinned. So then I came into this life.”

  Where had Rosa ever gotten hold of such concepts?

  “When you’re an old woman, you may be meditating in the mountains of Tibet,” said Eleanor with a smile. Later she reflected there was indeed something about her daughter that emanated a feeling of mountains and seclusion.

  “How did Hitler become so evil and powerful, Mother?” Rosa asked during another of their talks. Eleanor paused, shears in hand. She was pruning rose bushes that climbed up the wall of the house next to the driveway.

  “We all have a bit of Hitler in us,” she said. “We’re all responsible to some degree…,” her voice trailed off, as if there was much more she meant to say.

  “For what? For the deaths of Jews in concentration camps?” Rosa stooped down to smell a white overblown rose.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “We are. When a child starves in Africa or in India, we’re all responsible to some small degree.”

  “How can that be?” Rosa plucked the rose and held it between her fingers.

  “Each of us contains the seed of a Hitler. Each of us contains the seed of a murderer as well as a saint. No human atrocity is completely alien to us.”

  Rosa stared silently at the flower. Eleanor was surprised at her own speech. Where had these thoughts come from? She had not planned to say what she did.

  “What do you mean, Mother? Can you explain?”

  “There’s nothing to explain … that is …” Her thoughts became opaque. Words at the edge of her thoughts vanished.

  “Finish what you were saying. You never do. You always leave me hanging.”

  “I’ve forgotten what it was.”

  The clear thoughts in her mind had vanished beneath clouds, just as a landscape is obscured by clouds, fog, or mist. She would feel as if she were on the brink of understanding something, and then a thick cloud would drift over everything.

  Several months later Rosa approached Eleanor one afternoon when she was weeding the garden in the back, where so many of their conversations took place. Rosa had found old writings of her mother’s in the attic, fragments, a story in a college literary review, a poem written when Eleanor was a child of ten.

  “Mother, you write so well,” she said. “Why didn’t you continue?”

  “Every writer has one book in them. Their life story,” said Eleanor. She dug at a clump of dandelion weeds. “But …” She rubbed a sore reddish spot on her palm.

  “But what?” asked Rosa impatiently. “What else were you going to say?”

  Clouds swirled through Eleanor. She swayed dizzily for an instant as she squatted. The trowel trembled in her fingers. “Father used to urge me to write stories. He thought I had a gift. But I have nothing to say.”

  Rosa bristled. “You had plenty to say when you were younger. I’m sure you do now. You wrote so well.”

  Inside Eleanor, structures rumbled as if through the impact of a minor earthquake.

  “I suppose a true artist is driven to create.” Her voice sounded brisk. The structures were settling back in place. “Aaron is driven. An artist seems to have a mysterious gene, an extra amount of vitality. I don’t have it, but your father does. I enjoy music, and I enjoy my garden. My art lies simply in living life.”

  Rosa, in white shorts and a dark sleeveless top, deeply tanned, was sitting down on the grass beside her mother, who wore a large straw hat and a faded blue gardening dress. She sniffed a felled dandelion and said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” protested Eleanor. Inside her, though, was a huge dark mass of fear, kept at bay until Rosa’s words stirred it up. If she wrote the true stuff of her life, if she wrote about Heinrich and her hidden thoughts, all the structures would come tumbling down.

  CHAPTER 17

  ROSA IN BLOOM, 1957

  At eighteen I was at the height of my beauty and power. Yet I squandered these riches like an heiress determined to gamble away her fortune. I grew to
enjoy venturing to the edge of safety. What saved me was the sharpness of my perceptions when I was in physical danger. At other times I could be blind and deaf to what was going on. It took a life and death situation—or drugs—to shake me out of my trance.

  That summer, after a year in college, I found an office job in Manhattan where I rented a tiny room for six dollars a week. It was barely large enough for me to lie on the narrow bed and spread my arms out from wall to wall.

  I spent most of my free time on the streets.

  My purse contained a diaphragm in a battered case, a tube of spermicidal jelly, cosmetics, scraps of paper with names and phone numbers, a notebook with poems and story fragments, Kleenex, a small bottle of Courvoisier, and always a book. Chekov, George Eliot, Blake, or Yeats. Something classic to balance the scattered craziness of my life.

  In the evenings I took a modern dance class. But my life was so chaotic that I often arrived late, exhausted, or failed to show up at all. I spent hours wandering the streets, and I talked to people in coffee shops, bars, subways. As if I were a spider spinning a magnetic web, I would draw out their secrets. That was a skill I learned from you, Mother. I knew so little of life, and I wanted to learn all at once.

  By fucking men, I believed that I was getting to know something essential about human nature. “If the fool persists in her folly she will become wise.” That is, if she survives. I created identities for myself—false names, false pasts. If one grew painful, I would simply slip it off as a snake sheds its skin and would emerge as someone else.

  In the morning I might awaken in a stranger’s bed after only a few hours of sleep. Then I’d dash off to work. During lunch I answered ads for sleazy modeling jobs, while other girls in the office munched tuna sandwiches in the employees’ lounge.

  Along with sleazy photographers, I met real artists, actors, and musicians. I had an ability to arouse their protectiveness. They wanted to fatten up my skinny body, clothe me, take me in as if I were a stray cat. One photographer showed me pictures in fashion magazines of his former wife. He wanted to make me over, as he had with her. “Sweetheart, you need to get your hair done. Sweep it back like this. Pluck your brows. I can show you how to dress. I could get you into Vogue.”

  My favorite dress that summer was a sea green sheath. One morning I discovered dried menstrual stains on the back, and I realized I’d been wandering around like this for days. Spaced out! I was not in control, and it frightened me.

  Spacey, so spacey. Who was I?

  The “real” me—not one but many identities—sometimes emerged in frightening ways.

  “Are you in drag?” a stranger on the street asked me one day. Had he discerned that beneath the thick makeup and clinking jewelry, at times I felt half male with my bitten fingernails and my clumsy grooming? This encounter had a dreamlike quality of truth.

  Spacey and crazy as I was, I possessed a kind of magnetism, an electric voltage I had no idea how to handle. With a wave of an invisible wand, I drew people into my life. In times of danger, a slumbering sorceress inside me awakened. The sorceress could walk along a lonely street radiating waves of protective energy. The sorceress could glimpse inside someone’s mind when her survival was at stake. But in some ways I was pitiably weak. Chaotic. Panic stricken, as though I had ingested the panic inside Dad and swallowed it whole, because underneath his skin coursed panic.

  When I was in high school, sometimes he would drive me home at night under parkway lights that had an eerie orange glow. He’d ask what I was thinking, uneasy that he couldn’t enter my mind. The anxiety in his voice and his nerves penetrated me.

  Mother, I took on your thoughts and feelings, too. Where did you begin? Where did I end? The boundaries between us were liquid. I wasn’t yet a human being in my own right, but a mixture of conflicting elements.

  I longed to become an actress, but somehow this did not seem possible. While I was in high school, I’d taken an acting course at Dad’s college. This work breathed new life into me and stirred my imagination. But Puritanical ghosts haunted our household. Although Dad’s colleagues might be in the theater, for me this was not an option. His power was so deeply embedded in me that actually preparing for a career on stage seemed impossible. As if praying for some kind of miracle, I would kneel by my bed at night and pray to become an actress. What I was really praying for was deliverance from the spell of his conditioning, which was so binding, so blinding.

  That summer a Broadway actor befriended me. Over dinner one night he said, “You have the aura of a great performer. You could be a terrific actress. I can help you. You could move in with me.” We were in a dark, cozy Italian restaurant on MacDougal Street. I took a sip of Chianti. His eyes were kind.

  But I felt paralyzed. There was an invisible barrier I could not cross. My rebellious behavior went only so far. Not far enough to enjoy love or the fulfillment of my dreams.

  I fell in love with a jazz pianist. He was safe because he was married. I could pursue him, but he would never come too close. When we made love, it was as though the brilliance of the music, which he both composed and played, seeped in through my pores.

  “How are you, baby?” His voice on the phone, deep and slightly southern, would start a vortex of energy whirling inside me. He had grown up poor; he left school at fifteen; yet he had read widely, and he had a toughness, a knowledge of the world that I lacked.

  In the fall when I returned to college, I brooded over him. His existence in my life was a secret. There was no one in whom I could confide. Containing all this inside me, sometimes I felt as if I would burst. I would stare for hours at my bedroom walls, unable to will my body to move. I’d try to get places on time, but fail. I’d pick up strange men on the street or anywhere. I was frightened because I didn’t know what was happening to me.

  I stared at the walls.

  I wrote.

  Waves of depression swept over me. I wrote out hundreds of pages in my notebooks. Fevered thoughts, emotions. Unless I could write them down, I feared I would drown in them, and I had to note what I’d experienced in order to retain even a shred of sanity.

  In the college library I found a few books on Hindu meditation that had not been checked out in years. Seated cross-legged on my bed, I would focus on the tip of my nose or stare at the hands of a watch. I devoured books on mysticism and writings that expressed my own despair and confusion. Strindberg’s Diary. Existentialist writings. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.

  I was on scholarship. It was a mistake, I thought. The machines that scored our entrance tests must have erred, because I wasn’t really bright. Why had I worked so hard? Achievement brought a strange sense of disillusion—in my hands the golden ring turned to brass as I sifted the letter of acceptance through my fingers. Now that I had performed as you wanted, Mother, my efforts seemed futile.

  Still, the first few months at college had been exhilarating. At seven-teen, I was hungry for knowledge. I wanted to read every book in the library and study every academic course. Boys pursued me. At night my mailbox was stuffed with phone messages. I won the leading role in a college play. After being an outsider for so long, I was overwhelmed, dizzy with success that I did not know how to handle. Dad sent angry messages. “You’re spreading yourself too thin.” He did not approve of the acting or the social life. After one of his phone calls, I would curl up on the floor of my dorm room feeling paralyzed. Was I supposed to function like a machine? Evidently for him, only grades counted.

  During this time I dated a sensitive, gentle student, an English major a year ahead of me. He helped rid me of virginity (a top item on my agenda!). But afterwards I felt the urge to flee. Penetration of my body was one thing. Far scarier was penetration of the invisible shield I had built around myself.

  Nonetheless, I kept on seeing him.

  Then one weekend in November you came to visit. The three of us went to a football game. It was cold and overcast. Far below us, football players in their padded uniforms hurled themselves at e
ach other. What a ridiculous game! All around us were crowds of students and alumni. Wrapped in blankets and thick fur coats, this mob was drinking out of liquor flasks, laughing and cheering and yelling. They seemed barbaric. Amidst them all, I began to weep. I could feel your contempt for him—and hence contempt of me.

  “He comes from a vulgar Jewish background. That incredible necktie …” I could hear your voice, although you hadn’t actually spoken. I felt as if animals were ripping me apart. Beneath that, I felt my own coldness, as glacial as your own. Why did it matter so much what you thought?

  “We’re going to get married.” I told you later.

  “Really?” Your eyes narrowed slightly. Your grip tightened on the tea cup, and you looked past me at the pattern on the wallpaper of the tea shop. Then you changed the subject. Afterwards I had the familiar sensation of not having spoken at all.

  “It was as though you were behind glass when your mother was there,” he said later.

  “I don’t know why she upsets me so much.”

  He held me in his arms and comforted me.

  A week later I broke up with him. I didn’t reflect. I simply felt an unreasoning compulsion to flee.

  That had happened a year ago. Now in my Sophomore year, I had no one. The musician was far away. Occasionally I took the Greyhound bus to visit him in Manhattan, and we would make love in some hotel room. Back at college, I would float, lightheaded, unable to concentrate on classes or term papers. In my mind I’d be trying to recapture those moments of ecstasy, but all I could feel was emptiness.

  I would have an urge to lean forward and touch the neck of the boy in front of me in a lecture hall. Then I’d be overcome with shame and fear. What if I were to give into my impulses? At times, shadowy images of making love to a woman, stroking her breasts and soft thighs, would intrude. I was fearful of these images and pressed them down into the shadows.

  I joined an acting class. One night the teacher asked to speak with me after the others had left. “It’s as though the other person isn’t there when you’re on stage,” he said, glancing away in embarrassment. He was a slight, intense young man with soft brown hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. “It’s as though you’re looking into a mirror, and you see only yourself.”