by Carole Maso
We never made it to dinner that night. We skipped breakfast. “I’ve forgotten your last name,” he said distraughtly.
“That’s OK. It’s Chrysler, like the car. But it’s my night to help cook dinner. I’ve got to go.”
“Will I see you again?”
“You can’t help but see me again.”
“I could be your father,” he whispered.
“No, you couldn’t,” I said. “No. Not quite.” Max, he thought he could be my father.
I imagine for a minute, Max, being one of your women. But only for a minute.
The affair with the Composer followed the routine course.
By the end of the month he was hooked. It would have been the perfect time for him to leave, but he decided to stay on. And I must admit I was happy he did.
Max, why didn’t you ask me to come home that month for the Film Festival?
I grew attached to him. More than the others, though there were others that season. Who could resist the Sweater Man, the Apple-Crisp Maker, the Child Prodigy with his endless stories of Madame Boulanger? But it was different with the Composer. I don’t know how exactly. He was smart and funny. He knew a lot of things. He liked Talking Heads, the Bush-Tetras, Sibelius, Bartók. He taught me about the Synclavier—the thousand things it could do. He sped up symphonies until they became one note. He put my voice in and changed it, added rhythms, elongated the syllables.
“One night I’d like to record our lovemaking if that’s all right with you. I won’t tell you when. We don’t want any performances.”
“Sure,” I said.
It was a kind of magic. He would leave me messages in my mailbox: “I hear you breathing. I hear your breath as I work. Your breath is with me still.” I started wishing he’d stay for the high winds and heavy snows part.
“‘High winds and heavy snows,’” I read from the “Creosote Papers” that first night. “‘Keep an eye on your chimney, especially during foul weather. Is it still there? If not, don’t use the stove. And if the wind is blowing very hard, don’t open up your damper to a roaring fire; there is danger from sparks.
“‘Getting stuffy, close, headachy? Try cracking a window. Your fire burns on air. Too tight a space can asphyxiate or give you the dreaded cabin fever.
“‘Emergency exits—Know how to get out of your space fast. Find two directions for easy exit.’”
“I’ve got to go,” I told the Composer that first time. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
When I got to the Vaughn kitchen with its hundred labels, signs, instructions: No bones in the compost, Metal and wood spoons in this drawer, Round sponges here, Square sponges there, on and on, I came across a plastic yogurt container labeled Fish Tongues. Taped inside was a clipping from the New York Times:
Dr. Jamison examined 47 leading British artists and writers and found that 38% of them suffered from severe mood disorders. (Normally 6% of the population is stricken.) They would go through alternating periods of incredible creativity, sleeplessness and feverish activity. Then they would sink into depression. Fully 50% of the poets surveyed had been hospitalized for manic-depression.
A visual artist’s idea of a joke, no doubt.
For dinner a little Gypsy Soup from The Moosewood Cookbook. And after dinner always a fire, in fall.
I learned finally, Max, how to build fires and once I learned, I couldn’t stop making them. I kept trying to make them look like the yule log on TV at Christmas. There was real wood at Cummington, Max, from trees. Not the kind you spent a fortune buying on Sixth Avenue in little log packages from some little log salesman from God knows where.
Sometimes I miss you so much.
Mother loved fires, I remember that. She stared into them for hours while you sketched and we ran around the house.
Call me Max, now.
Real wood from real trees. Deer eating apples, Max. Sheep chewing grass. Right there in front of you. Real wood, really. Lots of fires.
We saw the figure 5 in gold.
Fall at Cummington meant lots of fires. Also a lot of tea drinking. Every few hours people would gather for more tea. Tea by the fire. Celestial Seasonings, of course—Cummington’s brand—the packages covered with flowers, swamis and symbols on every flap. There was a vaguely Buddhist or Moonie feel to them. There was something you could not trust in all of this. There were too many messages; you didn’t know why you were being told such things.
On the back of the Cranberry Cove tea there was a Dale Carnegie quotation. Like everything, I wrote it down: “Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.”
What does this have to do with tea? Max would have asked. “I object to any tea that implies a ‘lifestyle’ or a value system.”
Another story—actually a proposal—the idea is this, or it has something to do with this: woman, or rather Woman, the full October moon and harvesting at night. The photographer asked if I’d help her. “Sure,” I said, swigging back some Cranberry Cove. “Shall I bring the pear picker?” I ended up at midnight in a field of puffy white dandelions, bare breasted, hands on hips, shivering. I do not question these things. I am all for letting the Artist do whatever she sees fit. “Now what?” I ask. “Look strong,” she says. “Look at the earth.” “OK, now what?” “Turn your face this way.” In my profile she sees Woman. “Try putting your skirt over one knee. Now take off your skirt.” The bugs bite. The dandelions tickle, but it’s all for Art. “Now twirl around.” At another tea-drinking session we’ll laugh about this, maybe.
Joy Adler is painting an arrangement of tea and pears.
A church bell chimes ten times. I have woken late again. I love the early morning, but the clock chimes ten times—it couldn’t be eleven times, could it? And Suzanne’s been up since six, her requisite three pages for the day already finished.
Mariana walks up the hill and into the woods near the Hexagon. “It reminds me of home here. The wood talks to me like my father once did,” she says, “long ago in Germany.” Poles, they lived in a refugee camp during the war. In barracks of wood. From the vast black forest in her heart she makes chopping blocks, coffins. She can’t forget, she says, her father, who loved wood, or her mother, who cried in the dark barracks. The faces of the Germans everywhere. “Be thankful you are still alive.” She makes what look like ovens, bulbs, huts. And this a torture chamber—this a violated grave. “The wood speaks so loudly to me,” she says. “Sometimes it is hard to listen.” She carves. She chops. She weeps. She carves more. “Those were my parents you did that to,” she says into the air. When I look at her sculpture I’m trapped in her past with her. I’m just where she wants me to be.
He could turn the news into music. He could turn laughter or the wind in the trees into music. On the Synclavier he could make sounds from instruments never heard before.
Eugene, on his last day, took a long walk in the woods after packing his equipment. He knocked at my door and handed me a cassette tape. “This is for you,” he said. “We have made a shape together, Caroline, and it is ours forever.”
Jesus Listens to Verdi
He braids together blades of grass and listens to the music. “Do you hear that music?” he asks Alison.
“Yes, it’s Verdi’s Requiem.”
“It’s very sad, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“It makes me a little scared.”
“Me too.”
He sees hundreds of mouths opening, hundreds of hearts blooming. And the music. “They’re all singing for you,” Alison says.
“It makes it even harder, somehow.”
Van Gogh at the Met
Maggie and Alison Watch for the Comet
“‘Halley’s Comet is about 100 million miles off and heading our way at 66,000 miles an hour. Its closest approach to Earth this month—58 million miles—will be on No
vember 27. But tonight there are two opportunities for a preview in Western Massachusetts.’”
They pointed to the sky. Each night from the eleventh to the sixteenth of November they stood hour after hour up in the garden, the place with the best view. They wore sweaters and down vests. They brought a thermos of coffee, binoculars, a telescope.
The comet was to pass through the Hyades and the Pleiades. The Hyades, Alison knew, was a beautiful V-shaped formation of stars forming the head of Taurus the Bull.
Five nights later, Alison read, the comet was to pass through the Pleiades. Her voice rose in excitement. But despite the absence of the moon, the elaborate charts, the binoculars and telescope, they did not see the comet that week.
A Procession of Saints
There before Candace’s eyes saints parade by. They are shot through with arrows, strung up and beheaded, thrown into flaming pits, tied to stakes, jailed and crucified. Their heads split by axes. Their vaginas in boxes.
There’s Saint Lucy carrying her eyes on a platter. Saint Apollonia with her thong and pulled molar. Saint Agatha, patron saint of bells, her breasts on a plate. And here comes Saint Margaret, accused of seducing a nun. And Saint Marina dressed as a boy. There’s Saint Thérèse filled with longing. And Saint Joan—on fire. How they suffer.
Peace, serenity, love, Candace begs.
The Ostrich Fern in Fall
In her best handwriting Alison wrote the sign for the ostrich fern, and then had it laminated. For what are fiddleheads but the curled plumes of the ostrich fern in spring? Now they were nothing but tall brown stalks—dead, it seemed, but really each tufted brown shoot marked a spot. Each one said, Here, here, here, we return. Be patient. Have faith. We will return again.
Poem for Grey
From the earth
I dig for you
everything I can.
Bloodroot, gentian,
earthworm. A bottle that once
held water, a piece of clay,
a doll’s leg.
A huckle
a buckle
a beanstalk.
From the earth
I tear from its roots
the Interrupted Fern
to show you.
I don’t know what makes you want to stop.
Against this perfect
sky I picture you back.
The land comes out of your chin.
And the trees come out of your head.
I don’t know what makes you so in love with death.
In the garden
the hollyhocks
grown from seeds
are almost trees.
In France they grow
golden apples.
Why can’t this be enough?
In Italy there are umbrella trees.
I hand you
a huckle
a buckle
a potato, a flute, a cup
from the earth you love.
For you, Grey, my brother
I bring back all these shapes.
Take one.
Jesus and The Lamentation
“Note,” Jesus says, “how the very low center of gravity, the hunched, bending figures communicate the somber quality of the scene and arouse our compassion even before we have grasped the specific meaning of the event depicted. With extraordinary boldness, Giotto sets off the frozen grief of the human mourning against the frantic movement of the weeping angels among the clouds, as if the figures on the ground are restrained by their collective duty to maintain the stability of the composition while the angels, small and weightless as birds, do not share this burden. Let us note, too, how the impact of the drama is heightened by the severely simple setting; the descending slope of the hill acts as a unifying element and at the same time directs our glances toward my head and the head of my mother.”
The Life in the Sky
When it gets dark, Alison asks her mother to tell her about the stars.
Maggie points to the Corona Borealis. “Dionysius gave his bride an exquisite crown studded with jewels,” she says. “And when she died, he set the crown into the sky.
“For objecting to the marriage of Andromeda and Perseus, poor Cassiopeia was turned into stone. To humiliate her further, Neptune arranged her in the sky so that at certain times of the year she would appear to be hanging upside down.”
“Nice guy,” Alison says. “Tell me about the swan next!”
Maggie points out Cygnus. “Reckless Phaëthon, that mere mortal, convinced his father Helius, the sun god, to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun. When he lost control and the earth was threatened, Zeus intervened, hurling a thunderbolt, and Phaëthon fell into the river. Cygnus, who loved Phaëthon, dove into the water over and over and over again in search of the body. Apollo took pity, changed him into a swan and placed him in the sky.”
She has saved their favorite for last tonight. “Castor and Pollux, devoted twins, were the sons of Leda. Castor’s father was Tyndareus but Pollux’s father was Zeus. After Castor’s death, Pollux was overwhelmed with grief and longed to share his immortality with his beloved brother. Finally, Zeus reunited them by putting them together in the sky as Gemini.”
The Restoration
The rental TV has finally arrived. The answering machine is set up for calls. The Cuisinart is great, and little Oskar, who does the small jobs. My father’s cooking equipment is perfection. Welcome to the civilized world. I love the compact disc player, the VCR.
I can go to the Gay Film Festival, the New Directors’ Film Festival, the Polish Film Festival. I can watch Picasso painting on film. See Chantal Akerman’s early work. I can go to the San Genaro Festival, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, the Labor Day Parade. I’ve been away too long.
I flip on the rental TV. Immediately I learn something new. St. Clare is the patron saint of television. She and St. Francis were friends and one day she was too sick to attend mass at his place, but somehow she was there anyway, without stirring from her bed. For this, the church decided to make her the patron saint of television. This is no joke.
Suddenly I love the flood of images, the strangeness of this world. My therapist calls, leaving the second message on the machine. I’ve been lying low, but word is out now; it’s fall and I’m back. He will want to know how I feel about my father’s death. What my dreams are. Why I have not called.
Last night I had a dream I was walking a goldfinch on a leash. I wonder what Max would say about that?
“It means you always felt little as a child. It means I tried to keep you tame. It means your parents never loved you. Never took you to the country.”
Then he’d start in on Freud.
“You’re interested in Freud?” he’d ask. “How about this then: Freud said that the Surrealists would often send him their work. He said, ‘They think I approve of what they write. But it is not art.’ This, Caroline, is the kind of mind we’re dealing with here. Any takers? No thank you, Herr Freud. None for me, thanks.”
I turn off the sound on the rental TV and just watch the pictures. I put Glenn Gould on the CD. You had so many opinions, Max. And for better or worse, I am my father’s daughter.
Oh, there was a certain perversity to you and your opinions. If I was too opinionated, if I talked too much about one side of something, even something you yourself believed in or loved—foreign movies, for instance, me going on and on about Godard or Fellini or Fassbinder or whomever, you’d scold, “My God, Caroline, love an American movie now and again, won’ you? Love a Raging Bull, or Nashville, or something. How about Love Streams? Love Love Streams.”
You were always for the whole, never for the part. Myopic as you so often were, you always encouraged those you loved to take a broader view, and your best self loved the bigger picture, the picture beyond the picture. When I talked too much or too intensely about boys, then men, with my “predatory gleam” as you called it, you’d say, “My God, Caroline, have you no interest in women?” “As sexual partners?” I’d ask. “Yes,
exactly.” And then you’d put your arm around my shoulder and say, “Do I shock? Oh dear, I do not mean to shock. Veronica, can she really be ours?” you’d ask into the air. “Is this really our child?” And you, Max, the devout heterosexual, lover of women, woman-obsessed, womanizer.
About these shoes in the closet, Max. Are the women going to come back to claim them? With such a variety of sizes and styles, I could have a shoe sale on the street, set myself up right next to the incense people. What do I do if the one with the dog comes? Are those her topsiders in the closet? David always wanted a dog, as I recall, begged you for a dog, and you always said, every time, “I have never met a dog I liked.”
“OK, Caroline, that’s enough.”
A sore spot, Max, the one with the dog? What did she think, I wonder, about you being scattered around the Guggenheim? Every time I see her, she starts to cry. I understand she’s an actress.
Max on acting: “There are too many young people in New York who are in love with the notion of struggle. Too many people in love with the romance of failure, too many making the deliberate choice of a career they have not the talent, the perseverance or the luck for, all the odds against it. Too many working and working on a whim, and what propelled them into it? A few compliments on a small part in a third-grade pageant, a smattering of claps which became in that childish ear a ring of applause, the curtain going up and down and up and down, and all the curtseying and how they caught bouquets of flowers. But so often there was really no talent, no natural ability. So what was it? A need to be seen, perhaps, a ring in the ear, that’s all. Too many were unable to differentiate a good script from a bad one, too many simply did not know. And the tiresome, tiresome talk. ‘What is the motivation for this line?’ There was no governing intelligence, no instinct. The ‘I-feel-guilty, you-feel-guilty’ school of acting. The Jill Clayburgh, Diane Keaton, head-nodding, nose-crinkling school of acting. A constant examining and re-examining of ‘feelings.’ A regurgitation of pop psychology. A smallness. An essential stinginess, when you get down to it—opting for theory—though it masqueraded as something quite other than that.”
