“Linda, you’re home,” you said, more surprised than I was, and put a bag of coxinha down on the counter. The grease seeped through the wax paper, forming transparent spots.
“How was it?”
“How was what?” I answered.
“Jardins. With Melinda.”
“Oh. It was fine. She shopped. Then we had lunch.”
You walked to the kitchen table and glanced at the painting on the floor, but acted like it was nothing, like it could have been a pair of shoes you left there earlier.
“Dennis,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Why is my painting on the floor?”
Your eyes lowered.
“I meant to put it back before you got home.”
You tried to fix it; you picked her up by the frame and tried to put her back on the wall. But the look on my face must have told you otherwise.
“I’m sorry,” you said and rested her on the table.
“Why was it on the floor?”
“I don’t know how to say this without upsetting you.”
That will only upset me more, I thought. “Just tell me.”
You fumbled to find the words to explain it. I can’t remember another time when I’d seen your discomfort manifest so visibly—you crossed your arms tight over your chest and kept your eyes on the floor; shook your head and started and stopped sentences halfway through.
“Her eyes,” you said. “They follow me.” You picked up the painting to demonstrate. “See? She’s looking at you.”
I observed the painting: her legs crooked over the bathtub ledge, her stomach cresting from the water’s surface, her eyes and parted mouth facing the viewer. I remembered the painstaking layers that it took to proportion her legs so that they looked strong and feminine.
“I don’t see it,” I said. “What do you mean?”
It started when you began researching at home. You’d look up with a thought and notice the woman looking down at you. The first time you stared back, trying to will your mind into believing that it was an illusion, that it’s not possible for a painting to stare. But she was, you said. You changed seats—across the table, catty-corner, even with your back to the wall—but you could still feel her eyes upon you, even when you didn’t look up to see her.
“It began to affect my work. But what was I supposed to do? Go to another room? This is the only place with enough space for me to work.”
One day, when I wasn’t around, you took her down from the wall. Just for a few minutes. And when you put her back up, somehow her gaze had adjusted. She stopped looking, and you could work freely again.
“That fixed it for a while, but then it came back. A few minutes wasn’t enough. I needed her down there for longer.” You paused. “I’m sorry, Linda. You know I love your paintings.”
Perhaps I should have taken your explanation for what it was: that you needed to focus and the painting was a distraction. But the painting meant so much more to me than that. It was emblematic of a transformation, of a skill that I had taught myself when I truly thought I had no skills. It was special to me. I saw Celia, my muse, my inspiration, in that painting. I saw myself in that painting. I was deeply hurt.
I yelled at you for what felt like an eternity, accused you of disrespecting me, of pressuring me to meet with Melinda, and meanwhile spitting on the one thing I was proud of. I told you that I thought you had changed, that your relationship with the Provost had turned you into an opportunist, that I didn’t recognize the man I had married. When I finished you were dumbstruck, vacant, a sand castle washed away by the tide.
“It’s not true,” you said. “I’m not explaining myself well.”
“It is true. Even if you don’t know it, it is.”
I closed myself in the bedroom. You tried to come in and console me, but I pushed you away. You tried again, and again, until I asked you to leave the apartment, and you agreed to go to the library.
I ran my hands under cool water, lay down on the bed, and watched the ceiling turn.
When you came home from the library, I wouldn’t be there, and the flowers you bought me would go rotten before I returned, the water green and the stems black, the wrinkled petals fallen in a perfect circle around the vase.
Something broke inside me after our fight. Not to pieces, but a pop, the first sound before a firework crackles. It was a culmination of everything that had led up to that moment. The flame started in my chest and then ruptured, so that I was turned inside out, chest spread over my clavicles and around my shoulder blades. I was a burst woman when I called Celia and she finally answered. I asked if she could come over, and Celia appeared downstairs within the hour. I’ll call this new woman “L,” a woman who rushed out the door, arms flung open when Celia arrived. L met her out on the street and the tears followed. Celia embraced L and said she’d take her to the shore, where L could rejuvenate, just as her note had promised. She explained that she too needed to escape for a few days, that her house was filled with toxic energy, and that’s why she hadn’t returned L’s calls. She needed to be near the ocean.
L agreed without question. She ran upstairs to pack her bag while Celia waited for her outside. L uncovered the roll of reais you kept tucked in the back of the closet. L tossed the money, bathing suits, dresses, and a toothbrush into a backpack and met Celia at the bottom of the stairs. She left you a note:
I left for the beach.
Love,
Linda
They did the same at Celia’s apartment, then left for the bus station, where they boarded a six-hour bus to Paraty, a small coastal village just south of Rio de Janeiro.
How is escape quantified? In hours, in distance, by the levity of a hole? How far did L need to run before she felt—yes, of course, I’ve escaped. Wouldn’t she always worry that she’d be found the second she forgot that she was gone? Even if L could erase her memory against the sweeping hillside farms she watched through the bus window, a small piece of her would always worry that they hadn’t gone far enough.
But at that moment, now hours outside of São Paulo, the cityscape no longer visible in the skyline, L wasn’t worried at all. Celia pressed her forehead against the glass and described to her the various techniques for planting trees on mountains. She pointed to a group of perfectly lined trees planted on a diagonal down a mountain.
“If you plant trees in rows that point straight down the mountain, rainwater will wash up the roots and unplant the trees.” She looked at L directly. “That’s why they plant them diagonally. Isn’t that incredible?”
L took the bag of puff chips from her lap and crunched them loudly.
“The tree would go tumbling down the mountain?”
Celia took one too and bit it inch by inch with her two front teeth.
“Yes. I guess it would.”
The bus stopped at a roadside market lit by the moonlight. It was late, maybe ten or eleven at night. The market housed giant hares in pens out front. Celia struck a match to reveal them cuddled together in a corner, their red eyes flat reflections in the light. L and Celia huddled too, and whispered to each other how sweet the animals were, keeping warm with their sisters. They went to the restroom and L listened to the sounds Celia made in the adjacent stall, hoped that she could time her body to match Celia’s in the way women close to each other can. They met at the sinks, exchanged smiles in the mirrors.
One method to convince your mind that your body has traveled far enough is to sleep and hope that the dreams take you farther from, not closer to, your starting point. Nothing is worse than a dream that traps you, rats you out, reveals the fearful detail. When sleep doesn’t work, a second method is alcohol. Celia had packed a warm flask of tequila, which stung and scratched the backs of their throats as they passed it back and forth. They laughed through it. L, in many ways, had reverted to teenage p
rimitivism, and Celia had the tricks of a high school rebel. She pulled a cigarette from the center of her bra and they each took a drag and exhaled into a plastic bottle. When they arrived at the hostel in the middle of the night, a short walk from the center of Paraty, Celia opened the bottle and smoke drifted out into the twilight.
A sleeping man in a floral tunic guarded the wooden gates that led to a small camping ground and the hostel cabins. The hostel room had a cement floor and a bunk bed, a fan plugged into the single outlet, and a miniature refrigerator in the corner. Celia pulled a lava lamp from her duffel bag and plugged it into the fan’s socket.
“It will help with the mosquitos,” she said. The lava particles had broken apart in travel so the purple light refracted around the room. From outside, all the other windows glowed yellow against the deep blue night, while theirs hummed with a soft purple.
L and Celia walked into town to look for a restaurant with live music. The streets were made of large stones and deep divots. The difference between Paraty’s tourists and the natives was most evident in their walk. The locals glided over the stone pathways with ease—mountain, jungle, and ocean ease—while the rest of us needed to watch each step or risk falling.
This land wasn’t built for visitors, but it burned at night for them. With mud-stained skirt hems and necks and wrists adorned by green and purple stones, the locals captivated the tourists, cajoling us into bar fronts by offering pizza and Heineken beer. With Celia next to her, L could detect the ruses. She avoided the temptations of American culture that had flopped its tentacles into this fishing town, declined each advance for an American quesadilla or American whiskey, instead opting for the local cachaça, Gabriela, and baskets of coxinha. Celia stared adoringly, both soft and vain, a look that only a mentor can have for her pupil.
Celia and L returned to the hostel room, and Celia climbed into the top bunk without removing her shoes. The sleeping accommodations were tenuous. If one leg moved an inch, the metal frame rattled. L folded herself into the thin wool blanket and watched as Celia dropped articles of clothing to the floor, first one sandal, then the second, her blouse, a bra, a brass necklace, a pair of jeans. L waited, listened, tried to imagine if Celia slept on her back or on her stomach, chin and breasts pressed against the mattress that separated the two of them. At one point in the night, Celia got up to drink a bottle of water from the minifridge, and L wondered if she would forget which bed was hers. She didn’t. She climbed the metal ladder and the frame swayed with each step.
After Celia lay back down, only the insects could be heard. Eventually L was certain Celia had fallen back asleep, and so she too slept, and woke up not as a woman drifting outside her body, but as a woman who more deeply understood herself.
It’s me, Dennis. It’s still me. I had dreamt about this escape for a long time, a place where I could collect the parts that I actually like about myself, and leave behind the rest. I was ready to grow. And I now know, this type of growth can only be learned through an emotional apprenticeship from another woman who has learned the same.
I woke the next morning to an engine revving outside our window. Celia was already awake and in the shower, and so I opened the wooden shutters to find a teenage boy playing with his motorbike in the camping ground. He sped a little and then slid the tires to kick up dirt onto a stray dog that was barking and chasing after him.
“Good morning,” I heard from behind me and turned to find Celia standing naked in the doorframe, drying her body with a towel.
“I thought we could go to Trindade today,” she said. “It’s an hour bus ride through the mountains, but it’s worth it.” She sat down on the toilet and kept talking through the door. “I slept terribly! What a horrible bed that is. We’ll sleep on the beach.”
Once she’d dressed she went outside to ask for a cigarette from the boy on the motorbike. She had left hairs in the sink and a swipe of blue mascara on the towel. I hadn’t realized before how messy she was, but part of me took pleasure in tidying up after her. I gathered up her hairs and tossed them into the toilet, then cleaned the sink and the counter. I wiped my body down with a wet hand cloth and chose a dress in a color similar to Celia’s, green with small white daisies all over. She waited for me, swinging in the hammock strung on our porch, one leg dangling off the edge. We crossed the street to a café and drank cafezinhos, ate bread with ham and soft, tangy cheese baked into the top.
To escape, in essence, is to forget. Maybe it was easier because Celia never mentioned São Paulo. She hardly spoke about the past or the future, unless it was so distant that it had managed to return to the present. I had forgotten, as she and I ate our pastries and sipped our coffees, watching two gray cats twist in a pool of sunlight, that eventually I had to go back home. I had forgotten that you might be driven crazy by now, perhaps involving the Provost, perhaps involving the police. In reality, you were locked in anger. You made no phone calls, mentioned my escape to no one, not even to the clock on the wall. Every second that passed you made a choice to forget, which is not the same as actually forgetting.
On the first night of my escape, you returned home from work and found the note I’d left. The apartment made no noise, except for the occasional tick of a pipe behind the sink. You sat frozen at the kitchen table until you could assemble your thoughts into tangible shapes, shapes that you could cobble together. An hour passed. You investigated the bedroom and noticed the missing duffel bag, the thin gaps in the closet. You deduced that I had enough clothing for a few days at most. You noticed the box of jewelry and photographs left behind. She would never leave without this photograph, you thought, holding a picture of my mother in her garden. You sat on the edge of the mattress and wrestled with the dimming light.
Your worry morphed into frustration. You drank a can of beer. You splashed cold water on your face. You lay awake in bed, cursing me, cursing my neglect, and then, after a few hours of contemplation, you slept. You woke up the next morning resolute, thinking she would return because, frankly, where else would she go?
Celia stood from her chair, paid the woman at the cashier, and we walked to the center of town. She held on to the hem of my dress, and I rested my hand on her shoulder, gleefully following her to the bus station.
We were the last to board the packed bus, and so Celia took a seat with a young surfer in the first row. I had to fend for myself in the back of the bus, where one seat had opened across from a boy and his grandmother. The boy was covered in white boils, even on his eyelids. He seemed to understand his sympathy-evoking condition, and so he caused such a commotion that it was impossible not to look at him. His main performance was the bus dance. He took great pleasure in mirroring the bus’s movements, revving and crashing every time we stopped, started, turned, or veered. His grandmother, a stout woman whose waist collapsed over two seats, watched him with amusement. She clapped every time her grandson faked a big fall or pretended the bus had exploded. The performance continued when we left the main street and the bus hobbled onto the mountain. Palm leaves brushed the open windows and sometimes hit passengers in the face. The boy found this incredibly funny. He mocked the creaky bus by impersonating an old man with a cane, one hand on his hip, bent over, the other hand wobbling out front. Some passengers gave him coins. But when we reached the top of the mountain, the grandmother straightened her face and told the boy to sit down. He listened. He buckled his seatbelt and tucked the coins in his pocket.
The bus clung to the mountainside as we circled inches from a cliff, the driver shifting gears across angled turns. Some of these passengers were on a commute home from work. The driver picked up children along the way who had finished school. I looked to the front of the bus to make eye contact with Celia, hoping to find a mutual glimpse of astonishment, but Celia laughed, unconcerned with the bronzed surfer.
The bus arrived at Trindade, and most passengers disembarked to the right, toward the center of town.
I began to follow the crowd, but Celia stopped me. The surfer had given her directions to the ocean. He pointed through a small expanse of open grassland. She kissed him on the cheek and repeated the directions back to him, thanked him again with a kiss on the other cheek, and left him at the stop.
We walked through grassland, underneath a canopy of spindly branches, until the end of the path revealed a crescent shoreline. The morning had brought us sunshine, but since then clouds had edged into the afternoon. I could see the moon sitting close to the horizon, a white pastel sphere peeking through the blue expanse, kicking up waves against the coast. I was transfixed by the repeated force—boom, slap, boom, slap—crashing against the black rocks jutting from the inlet. Water on stone on water.
“I liked that surfer,” Celia said.
“What did you two talk about?”
“My mother. His parents are Lebanese too.” She drew a figure eight in the sand with her sandal. “I should have invited him to come with us.”
She started toward the other side of the beach and waved for me to keep moving. I joined her, and we walked across a stream to the base of a mountain. Celia tossed her sandals on the dirt shoreline—the soft jungle soil would have swallowed them whole on our hike. We went barefoot, Celia in front, the ocean at our side, the tangled rainforest surrounding us. I smelled the viscous honey drops, heard the vibrato of dragonfly wings, felt the chilly breeze from the oceanside. When I looked up to share in this glory with Celia, I realized that she had climbed well ahead and was stopped, waiting, arms crossed and looking down at me.
“What’s taking so long?” she said.
I apologized, hurried up, and she turned and kept hiking.
I thought maybe this was just a hiccup. What could I possibly have done to bother her?
A toucan flew over our heads and landed high on a tree branch, so I craned my head over the edge to look for him. Celia scolded me for being reckless. I took a drink from a halved bamboo stalk. Celia commented on how exhausted I looked.
It Is Wood, It Is Stone Page 12
