by Carole Maso
We were left breathless at precipices, needing more than we ever needed, it seemed. A couple makes love in the graveyard under the northern lights. “Shit, is that the police?” the one from New York asks, looking at the floodlights in the sky.
L. wants N. but all she can think of is T., and it goes on like this.
How to keep order in a community of thirty artists and assorted children (Octavio, Zoe, Yoho, Olympia, Milano, Lorelei, Cleopatra, etc.) for the summer. The community had worked out a detailed set of rules. Round sponges for pots. Square sponges for surfaces. The labeling of leftovers a must—all food containers marked with masking tape divulging the contents and the date: Lentil soup 7/7. Stir fry 7/15. Brown rice 7/3.
From down the hill, artist/gardeners come with bags full of lettuces, snow peas. All artists do chores here, it’s part of the philosophy of the place. It’s a communal life, yes, in the eighties. It’s simple: artists help run things, artists do chores—office work, cooking, working in the children’s program, going on the milk-and-egg run, whatever your preference. Two city girls show off the carrots they’ve picked. One muses on carrot picking. “It felt familiar somehow, it felt like, it felt like . . . what? It felt like, what? I know, it felt like taking out a tampon!’’ she says, so pleased with herself. She’s a poet, after all.
It was that garden I think I loved most. Planting things in rows. Watching them grow. Weeding. Keeping order. The Maestro Peas. The Champion Radish. The Jubilee Sweet Corn. Often I’d take the children up there. My Early Wonder Beets! Miracles everywhere. Food growing in dirt. Children giggling.
Sometimes I slept over in the Children’s Barn as a chore. After dinner I’d go to my sleep-over room at the bottom of the barn with a book to read, with letters to write, while mothers or fathers would get their children ready for bed. In each room of the big barn a bedtime story, a song, a prayer, children in feet pajamas—the nights often chilly even in August. The smell of toothpaste and powder, everywhere, then finally sleep. I loved the dreaming barn. The sounds of children murmuring in their sleep. The still small worries of their nights. A nightmare. A cry. Octavio says “Jupiter” in his sleep. I get up and hold him close. I love his little curly head. I take back the part about small worries. “Where is mother?” he howls. “Sleep,” I tell him and he sinks back into the galaxy. I check on the other children. Linger there. You take your job far too seriously, the artists who are awake for breakfast say, after my report of the previous night’s events.
My affair with the Children’s Counselor led me on trips to the aquarium, the dinosaur museum, the creamery. But my favorite trip of all was to the Smith College greenhouse. “Oh to make love, here, on the mossy floor in the humid air,” the children running up and down the aisles, feverishly picking what they should not touch.
There were always a lot of possibilities in these summer groups. Who could resist Hawk, just back from a vision quest in New Mexico? Who could resist the Minister’s Daughter? Cummington in summer was a show a night, a thrill a minute, better than New York. Who could resist the Handywoman? Sometimes a chore was to help assemble a sink, or clean the leaves from the drains, or clean out the chimneys—all impossibly erotic. Who could resist being covered with ash or leafslime or grease? Who could resist the guy who fixed foreign cars in Florence? And meanwhile, my father, that same summer back in New York busy romancing the NYU librarian, the exchange student, the summer intern, the waitress at the Cafe Degli Artistes.
Who, I ask, could pass up Normal Boy, from Vermont, who stayed that summer in the Astro Cabin, near the apple tree where the deer roamed in the early moming? Normal Boy, with his muscles and boyish face. The Astro Cabin, with the fantastic skylight where at night you could see all the stars. “God,” I said, lying on his bed while he sat diligently at his typewriter. “It looks like a planetarium.”
“What a dumb New York thing to say,” he says. “Why did you stop writing novels anyway?” he asks as he broods over his.
“First,” I tell him, “you must make a commitment like love to it,” I say. And I can’t do that right now. “Second, you must have something to say.” I realize it’s starting to sound like a lecture. “But maybe most importantly you must have a way to say it.” Normal Boy looks distraught at such a thorough answer, as though he can’t believe I’ve actually thought about it. “Love me,” Normal Boy says. “Why don’t you?” He is the most handsome of normal boys and he’s not used to girls treating him like this.
Normal Boy looks lonely, and there’s nothing I want to do or can do to help him. Even if I could be in love with him, and I can’t, he would still be completely alone with the hundred pages of his novel. I want something other than that, I think to myself. “I wrote Delirium ten years ago,” I tell Normal Boy, who’s twenty-three. “I’m thirty now. The world is spinning away. It’s going so fast we don’t even know it’s moving.” At least still it for a moment, I think to myself, still it with an image if you can. Or at least a little soiree in the Den.
The invitation read: “Please come to a nocturnal Gathering of Women in the Den at 11 p.m.” My hosts wore harem pants, scarves. We drank cognac in bowled glasses and smoked hashish in the stone room. A scent of spices. A flash of dark hair. They were all there: the Minister’s Daughter, the Young Beauty, the Contortionist, the Handywoman. The summer finally slowing up here. Cigarettes rolled by hand. The smell of blackberries. The touch of silver birch in the moonlight. Of smooth, smooth skin. And I knew finally, looking at all those liquid women in the half-light as we flirted and joked and napped and purred and smoked and sighed, that this was the secret, but real, life.
In the sky Virgo, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Cygnus. In the sky Venus rising. Then light. It was my first dawn, the whole world on fire. The light caressing this familiar and beautiful landscape, the ferns, fantastic, alive, at my feet. The fierceness of tiger lilies, cattails, the heavy hydrangeas, the smell of camomile and thyme—all my senses keener somehow, on end. The tractor. The wood piled up by my neighbors, the Thayers.
It must be very early because it’s still quiet over there. The sheep they are sheep-sitting for their daughter graze in the backyard. No one is awake yet. I near my door.
The baaing of a few sheep floats over on a sweet breeze. Then all is silent.
“Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world have mercy on us,’’ I whisper and enter the cool dark house.
I roam around in the kitchen a bit. Summer. Mice jumping out of cereal boxes, mice in the plastic in the ceiling’s insulation. Mice dancing on the kitchen table and one lazy cat named Edward.
In the Frazier kitchen a notice posted:
Writers and Artists:
—Virginia Woolf did her dishes.
—Annibale Carracci did his.
—Proust probably didn’t do his, but hell, he was richer than God.
A clean kitchen is a creative kitchen.
I run into a painter who has just gotten back from the dump run. “You’ll never guess what I found,” he says. He shows me a weathered archery target wrapped in newspaper. “And the newspaper,” he says, “is from the day I was born!” I wonder what I am to think of this. “Great, that’s great. Neat.” I know someday in his open studio we’ll be seeing circle after obsessive circle in his work. Something entitled “Birthday,” no doubt. Here, we turn everything into art.
I prefer sometimes what I believe is the simple life of the Thayers: Leon, deaf now, riding his tractor across the expanse of green. Olive filled with life, still, at eighty-five, snipping flowers from her cutting garden, almost skipping to the mailbox. Drinking in the day’s sun. And the sun is only the sun. Her grave waits nonetheless, just a few yards away in Dawes Cemetery. The stone up, already engraved.
Leon D. Thayer
1895–19
Olive M.
1898–19
Here at the Community, where there is so much life, the graveyard still at the center. I go in there this morning and sit. There are many good stones.
I’ve d
one lots of grave rubbings with the children. Quiet Cora and John Snow, Doctor Royal Joy, the Philbricks, whose joined hands shake farewell against tiger lilies each July. And of course, the Abolitionists:
Can you see this picture, Max? I heard you gave your eyes to the eye bank. It is so much like you. The thing you treasured most, those intelligent, pale, all-seeing eyes. So I repeat the question. Shall I hold this photo closer to light or away from light? What’s better now?
Shall I write you an epitaph? You who have no stone?
Scholar, Teacher, Father, Lover. You who insisted on being cremated and having your ashes sprinkled around the Guggenheim Museum. “That museum addition is not going up if I have anything to say about it,” you once said. “Over my dead body.”
I don’t know, Max. This is just your sort of humor, but it’s not all that funny. The Guggenheim for a gravestone.
“Max Chrysler was cremated and his ashes whirled around the Guggenheim by his son David. There was no official ceremony.” Sometimes I could kill David for taking you so seriously.
And Mother—with no real stone either, no place to visit. Buried secretly in some unconsecrated piece of frozen ground in Quebec province, her parents hurrying her “home,” mon Dieu.
I remember a flash of dark hair. I remember her standing in a garden. Her white hand clenched.
Mon coeur, mon petit fromage, mon oiseau, you called her. I like to think of her now somewhere near the Hotel Frontenac, in the belle province where you first met her, where you spent your first night together. “It was carnival. There was twenty feet of snow.” These things I have memorized. “I was there for a conference on the relationship between beauty, love and art in the twentieth century, and there she was.” No wait. That’s not right. He was a painter then who followed any celebration, anywhere. He was just out of college at the time and in some sort of despair. “I found her parked in a snow bank, laughing hysterically in the ten-degree cold. I don’t think they had windchill factors then. She was saying over and over, ‘Le bonhomme vivre.’ And ‘Qui suis-je?’—a game from her childhood. ‘Vous êtes une femme magnifique.’ I asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted me to take her to the Hotel Frontenac. Jesus, what a night.”
I think of her death curled inside her from the start like a fiddlehead fern.
“‘I love the ice sculptures,’ she kept saying.
‘Oh my sweet, petite Veronique. Mon ange.’”
Max.
Scholar. Teacher. Husband. Father. Lover.
“She was so beautiful. So extraordinary.”
Did you try to paint her into a life?
I count the Thayers’ sheep, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Tired, I drag myself up the hill and to my room. I dream myself to sleep, counting sheep.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
The sheep on their way to a sheep show are dressed in hoods and coats, medieval executioners.
I open her clenched hand one finger at a time.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
When I wake up it is late afternoon. As I walk through the woods I see the Young Beauty strewing pinecones she has painted white. She is hanging white muslin from the trees. In the studio she is building day pieces the size of herself. She talks of her move from paint to day. She talks of going deep into herself and bringing back shapes. Already she’s brought such beautiful shapes into the world. She describes with delight these shapes, amazed as anyone.
“I’ve got to feel the earth. Do you know what I’m saying?”
I do. I’ve got to feel flesh, bone, hair, earth, somehow in words. The urgency of flesh, bone, hair. The thousand demands of blood.
I ring the dinner bell. The artists gather. Mimi and the Contortionist talk about Rajneesh, the globe-trotting guru. The Druid and Celtic crowd are not here tonight. They went to look at stones somewhere on the Vermont border.
I open her hand. She holds a spiral in her palm.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
The Young Beauty sits next to me. She throws back her head. Her beautiful dark hair. I look at her sculpted face. The tendons in her neck. We enter sexual time. We sit across from each other at the crowded dinner table. The conversation is about bears, I think. What to do if you see one—throw mothballs, could that be what they are saying? Eat garlic? Run downhill? People pass out various useful instructions regarding the plant and animal kingdom—heady stuff for the New York crowd.
Bears will take the path of least resistance, someone is saying. They will walk where you walk. In other words, they will take the path you are on toward you.
“Should we or should we not wrap the tomatoes in plastic dresses? They’re predicting frost for tonight,” says the ingenious director, who uses bridal veil purchased at a yard sale for mosquito netting.
I could stay warm, I think, with her. They’re talking about something else now, tofu burgers or the weasel walk or Julian Schnabel. They’re passing out lists of things—poisonous plants, the names of trees. The truth is we have been making love from the first moment we saw each other, at the first residents’ meeting. And then last night at the soiree. We make love as we eat. They can’t get to us. We won’t even engage in bear conversation. She pins her hair to the top of her head. She passes me a porcelain cup, a spoon to hold onto, something to both prolong our pleasure and bring us safely through the meal.
It comes to her as we are sitting there. In her studio she is making a forest of birches to bring back to New York. Each day they grow taller and taller. Figures, yes, but trees nonetheless. It’s what I’ve always wanted. In New York she made little branch sculptures. Here there’s been a leap in scale. Our desire helps her understand this desire. It’s what I’ve always wanted. “My life is in trees,” she says. “I think I once was a tree,” she giggles.
“It’s lovely,” I tell her, “to think of yourself as a tree.” She is making a place to stand. A home for herself. “I want to go further,” she says. “Look longer. Harder. I want to go far away.” Yes.
We start up the hill to my room in the large white farmhouse in the day’s last light, and it seems to me like the first moment of the world. Olive in her cotton dress calls to Leon from her upstairs window, but he can’t hear anything anymore. He lingers in the graveyard. The air is so clear this evening, so wonderfully sweet. The hydrangeas bow their sexual heads. I take her hand as we cross the cemetery home, up the hill to my room. Leon tips his straw hat to us, as we pass him standing among the granite stones.
I could think of worse places to lie down forever.
Cygnus
Her mother points to Deneb, the white star in the tail of the Swan. “It can be seen,” Maggie says, “any time of the year. It is almost five hundred light years away.” Alison nods sleepily.
“Its candlepower must be enormous to make it shine as bright as it does at this distance. It is supposed to be ten thousand times as luminous as the sun.”
Watch Hill
Sheep graze in a green field. It must be Cummington, I think. Leon Thayer deep in the ground. Olive, too, I suppose. I hear the sound of a lute.
Really, a lute?
Yes. A lute: Leon Thayer yet to be born—yet to be born by a long shot. It’s hundreds of years ago. Something in the light tells me so.
There is the shepherd. There are his sheep. He picks up a stone and begins to draw something. Yes, of course, it’s the young boy Giotto. My God! He’s drawing sheep. He’s making them so beautiful! His angel sheep. Cimabue has not walked into the frame of this dream yet. He has not yet discovered the boy drawing sheep in that field. Maybe he’s in the next town still, buying bread, finding a good goat. Maybe he’s still at home, unsure of whether to go out today or not. The boy stands up and walks toward me. It cannot be easy to do what he will do. Let me hold him for one moment under the sky’s aqua dome. Let me hold him for one moment now, before everythin
g is different forever. And something so odd happens as I take him into my arms, this child of light. As I hug him close, his face turns into my best friend Steven’s face. “My God,” I whisper to him, “you look exactly like a boy I will love thousands of years from now.” He just smiles and runs off, counting sheep.
I open my eyes. “Steven.”
“Caroline.”
“I must be dreaming,” I say. “Steven?”
“Hey, you make a terrific bride!”
I’m wrapped in bridal veil for protection from the mosquitoes. I see him through that blur. It’s definitely him though. “Those tulips!”
“For you,” he says. They cup the air.
“How long have you been here?”
“Not that long. Get dressed. I’m here to take you on an outing. I’ve got special permission to take you out of art jail. I’m the rescue squad.”
“My hero,” I say, hugging him, happier than I can remember being in a long time.
“We’re going to the sea.”
I can’t believe he’s saying this. “What sea?”
“The sea next to Rhode Island. I’ve done my research.” A map of blue unfolds to the floor.
“What were you dreaming?”
I dreamt you were Giotto, I think, looking at him. Dark tulips hover, the color of his eyes. But instead I tell him of a dream from another night. “I dreamt of a bear that would not spare us.”
“Oh God, I knew it was serious. We’ve got to get you out of here!”
“How though?”
“I’ve rented a car.”
“We’re really going then?”
“Look, I’ve got my thongs on. I’ve got everything.” He puts his feet up on my bed. He unzips his pants to show me his bathing suit. It’s true.
“And it’s like a miracle. It’s my day off. No Octavio, Zoe, Yoho, et cetera. How did you know?”
“It’s Sunday, Caroline. Sunday. Sunday’s the day.”
“Right.”
“So let’s go. I’ve packed us a picnic. Champagne and fruit. Some good bread. And I’ve rented a red car.”
