The Ancestry of Objects

by Tatiana Ryckman

  At night we dream of wolves. Their hunger forces us to admit the embarrassing: that we want to be special, exceptional. We want them to spare us, we want to be revered by something wild and beautiful. But when their teeth burrow into our flesh, we force ourself to watch. Do not look away, we say in the dream. This is what you wanted.

  We open our eyes in the creamy ruffle of bedspreads and feel the disquiet of danger at the base of our neck.

  David says one evening after a long silence that people are dependent on one another. We look up from our book, from where we rest our head on his knee, and he says, closing Nietzsche around his thumb and lowering the book to the arm of the couch, Like sentences.

  People are like sentences?

  He pets our head and looks into the middle of the room, You know, he tries again, Relationships between people are similar to the relationships between ideas. People depend on one another for meaning.

  We look at him until, a moment later, he waves his hand, Oh never mind, he laughs. That was a bit jejune, I guess.

  We see that the man is ashamed, that he would like to impress us and we have not adequately validated the performance and that he wishes to take it back, to escape the embarrassing descent of his misstep. We feel tenderness for his shame, as if it were a meal we could share. We prize in that moment our mutual inability to be alone well, and for the tragedy of admitting it.

  It’s a nice thought, we say, and as he lifts the book back to his face, he pauses to look at us or through us and we think Now. Now, now.

  At night we suffocate against his chest because he feels tender and to move would disrupt the feeling and so we breathe our own air in again, wondering how long we can stay like this before we will die. We remember that this is the goal, and so relax into the discomfort. To suffer is our penance for agreeing to live a little longer.

  David talks about their vacations—beaches and ruins. Through him we learn what life could be like—desperately swimming from one raft of pleasure to the next. Each little island delaying the moment of drowning a little longer.

  We think of his trips and bottles of Scotch and suits as fractions of the cost of our existence—one could pay a wintertime utility bill, another a quarter of our last year’s taxes. We think of David’s keeping busy. That motion is a distraction from pain. That the limitless search for abundance is a way to keep satisfaction at bay. That David runs to us so he will not have to confront the fragile shell of his own life, or the nothing it contains. That we do the same.

  David cannot believe we don’t travel. Have not taken an airplane. To where? We think of asking but say instead, Things being what they are, and he bristles for the first time. He believes we are being obstinate. It is the beginning of his disillusionment. What does that even mean? he asks. And because we know it will make him ashamed, and because his anger makes him look at us closely and without the mask of affection, we say we can’t afford it. He sees the house again. The old things. He remembers we are not working and that he is generous. We do not bother to clarify: We can’t afford to do things we don’t want to do. We don’t explain the siren’s song of inertia. And even if he wants to save us, he knows he can’t.

  David says we are beautiful. David says we are smart. David says we are serious. David says we are too serious. David says to relax. David says we are a slut for his cock. David says we like that. David says we are a good little girl riding that cock. David says to look him in the eye, says he wants to see our pretty green eyes when he comes.

  And if he doesn’t say it, stops saying it, can no longer say it, it will cease to be true. Except the parts that we believe. The worst of it.

  What was once a new language becomes a shared lexicon—first we are undressed by David and then he moves down our body until, mouth to cunt, we see only his gentle curls of graying hair. When we come against his mouth he climbs toward us, smiling and satisfied with himself, to slip inside of us and press the wet of us to our own mouth with his. We are later positioned over the edge of the bed, our hair is crossed in front of our throat and held tightly behind in David’s fist like a rein. When he is ready to ejaculate he pulls away and we feel the soft spray of his come across our back and then his tongue as he licks it from our skin.

  Each time David comes, the guilt shrinks so that the noose of shame which ties us together diminishes into habit. As the guilt diminishes so does the pleasure. And with the pleasure our worth. We adjust quickly to the ease of falling into bed, into each other, and question our fantasies, so easy now to fulfill, they are exhausting and real, so convenient that being filled with cock or wanted or choked or pressed into the mattress morphs smoothly into the familiar rhythm of a series of impassive words comma strokes comma another burst of fitful thrusts describing the body inside period

  What is this word in the margin? David asks, holding up a book he’s pulled from the shelf.

  Gingivitis, we say, looking over his shoulder. He is in a white T-shirt and we believe for a moment this is a different time, and we are different people in a different life. That this is a story about an affair. It imbues the moment with possible tragedy and impossible romance. We are pained by his nearness.

  He laughs. Why?

  We shrug. It was a joke.

  I don’t get it.

  Well, you laughed.

  You’re reading it again? David asks when he sees the book we are carrying to the couch.

  Just skimming. He is quiet and studies us like a painting one does not particularly enjoy but finds curious. I thought you liked it? we say.

  I do, I’ve just never felt that way, David says.

  What way, we ask.

  Blindly devoted. Longing at the expense of practicality. It’s always gotten in the way of me rereading it to the end.

  Oh? we say flatly. We aren’t sure if this is intended to be an insult or if he lacks self-awareness.

  Its real flaw, David announces, is that it purports to show all facets of the human experience but doesn’t really. It doesn’t have room for people who just want to do their work and go home and relax. I mean, there’s laundry to be done. He looks back at the book in his hand. Contentment, he says finally. What ever happened to contentment?

  I don’t believe you’re so content, we say. If you were, you wouldn’t be here.

  David says of the woman who left him before he married Lara: Not to be loved by the person you love does not mean you are unlovable.

  We are moved by this vulnerable pronouncement. Then we suspect that Lara was his therapist. And that these are parting words.

  We leave the house for the park for the shade of the trees for the distraction for the illusion of peace for the effect of its wall-lessness on our brain, as if our thoughts only go as far as the container our body is in. Every day as we stare at the ceiling above our bed we think disparaging thoughts about Lara—but here, we know better. She only appears small because we see her from a distance.

  It is easy in the murmur of some natural space to predict our heartache and set it aside for later. We breathe long, full breaths of humid air.

  We have grown accustomed to the sweater. We look for it when we return, and if we forget, we are pleased and startled by its presence. We rely on it to give the confusing pursuit of living continuity, to supply some external narrative that might provide the illusion of structure. Still, we are already steeling ourself for its predictable disappearance. We know already that this particular bend in the path will always remind us of it when it is gone. That we will not be able to enter the shade of the trees without anticipating its sudden red against the low stone wall and tangle of branches beyond. Without wondering what its new life is like. If he’s happy.

  David comes while we are away. We know because there is a note tucked between the screen and the frame. We hate and love that we have missed him. That he had occasion to miss us. That we had somewhere else to be.

  We dream a giant woman carries us through space like a newborn confronted by the bewildering newness
of everything. When we awaken alone in a pool of late summer sweat we long for this celestial mother—to climb upon her lap and weep, and will she stroke our hair? And will she coo comforting words? Will she love us? Will she say You are good, and which one of us will she mean? Which part of ourself, or the entirety of us? And will she hold our small feet in her enormous hands and, peddling them through the air, say: First this one, then this one, that’s the way forward.

  We dress quickly and leave without performing the rituals of the morning. Without coffee without brushing our teeth without standing in the middle of the house looking from side to side for something to seem worth doing.

  We pass through the stone columns that announce the park’s entrance. We cross a long field. We startle deer only a few steps away. We see wild strawberries but then wonder if they only look like strawberries. At the top of a hill we notice a trail veering off the path. We have passed this spot a dozen times this summer and never noticed it. We are impressed with our own lack of knowledge.

  We follow the new path. It abuts a private property and we wonder if we will be scolded and prepare a speech to prove our innocence, but no one is there and no one says anything. We cross a small stream on a wooden board. We look between many pairs of trees for where the trail continues. We eventually choose to go vaguely left. Though only on the other side of the hill we usually climb, everything seems different. The earth more brown, the trees farther apart, the canopy more closed. We wander into a bramble of unripe blackberries. We think about ticks, about chiggers, about spiders, about the litany of our childhood fears, realizing only now that they all still exist. On the other side of the blackberries we come to a narrow road we don’t recognize with no sidewalk. As we emerge, a car drives by and a young couple looks at us as if we are the wilderness.

  We turn to go back the way we came. When we re-enter the pathless brown of newly fallen leaves we admit that we are lost, or rather, that we do not know where we are. There is pleasure in the discovery. We are not afraid because there is a road, which surely leads to civilization. Because we see the stream and know that eventually it will lead to the place we crossed it. Because though very large, the park is surrounded by homes and eventually, without the opportunity to starve or dehydrate, we will make it out alive. That it is entirely up to us to do so fills us with the thrill of independence. It occurs to us to want a love like this. Someone to get safely lost in. To be such a person.

  David does not lie that he will leave his wife, but he lies that he has never felt this way: irresponsible, happy. And we do not ask him to leave her, but in the memories we make of the future he has no wedding band and he lives inside us, at the sink, at the foot of the bed, over the backs of chairs, and even when he is nowhere we can see—always behind always out of sight out of the corners of our eyes he is still in, moving in/through us like light traveling over porcelain figurines in glass-doored cabinets. David always the size of present tense, never moving toward or away, and when he appears on the front steps, green paint flaking, we open the door, and when he does not we wait, turn, wait, and stand on the cool cement, we imagine again that we are David, we look at us first through the eyes of the wealthy man, then as the man posed, absolutely still in our mind like the forever of ancient china plates resting perfectly in eternal patterns of dust.

  He complains of Lara, of her monologue of criticism, of the more dishes he washes than she, of the toothpaste tube, and of nagging, and he says, I wonder how things would be different?

  If what?

  If we were together. He looks at us with a tenderness we mistrust.

  We do not say Exactly the same. Us: dull and familiar. A wife. And someone else, easy, kept safely on the other side of town. We do not say there may be a reason for her bitterness and dissatisfaction. We do not say that it is the same reason we exist.

  We pat him on the arm and nod, looking away and out the sheer lace of the curtain.

  I wonder, we say finally.

  Then one evening there is nothing to say.

  There is something reassuring about watching closely as we are disabused of the illusion. Like having our eyes held open while the neighbor boy kicks a dog. Over and over. The willful hardening of the heart. The blood-rush of the power of staying still when we are asked to squirm.

  We allow ourself instead the milquetoast superiority that comes with pity.

  It is the end of the third week and already the rhythm of his visits/thrusts/days suggest that this/we, too, are ordinary. David says: New York. Or: cruise/theater/places people go (to buy things, to fill the empty spaces and hours, but we have no empty spaces in our mind for the crushing weight of people ready to buy or gamble or sit idle on a boat like immigrants waiting always for something good, pleading with a god for something better, then the unavoidable end and disappointment of returning to life, so each place far away will be remembered better than it was). In the easy domestic life/mounting lack of enthusiasm, David says, To the beach. And in our mind we see ourself standing on a hot soft yellow as he crashes into the white foam of waves. The blue-black of the mystery that waits below the surface. We shade our eyes from the harsh light of open sky with a pale hand, endless blue above and beyond in all directions, a collage of sand and scrubby trees from beach images accumulate behind us. We are an island to the sailor looking always for a place to land.

  So easily David comes/goes and always the two are the same. Him in or outside, always just outside of our vision. Waiting, maybe for Lara to die with her mother, the whole life he promised disappearing easily to make room for Anything Else to move into its place, even the deep comfort of an understandable sadness, to replace the one that is so un-understandable to him or Lara. How could you not know it would be this way? We want to/don’t say because who are we? We wonder even when David—made up entirely in our mind, maybe a ghost like everyone else in our life—is there, we wonder Who are we to ask this man why he stays? Or doesn’t.

  The fantasy is not to have David but to be known by David. That he will leave no stone unturned in his need to see more of us more deeply, that nothing he finds could diminish his desire. That even in our darkest recesses, we are acceptable, okay. That we will be okay. That, more than searching for an answer, he will be consumed by the curiosity to ask.

  But David does not ask questions. David does not peer into the cavern of our heart. There is nothing he wants to know, and so he says without saying, we are not worth knowing.

  Alone in the grocery store, we find David’s ghost in front of bins of dried things and imagine the drops from the condensation of his milk dried into the floor, rehydrated and dried again. No place, we fear, will ever be real again without the memory of David baked into the skin of tiles and appliances and drinks and bars and shelves and each thing in each place, even new objects will be the idea of something David touched, the milk cartons in other towns representative of David’s body, the most oblivious square of foreign, pale floor, the idea of all things, then always the idea of David.

  We pick things from shelves wondering, hoping that David will be there, of course David is not there. David is at the office in our house in his house packing to be at the office/in our house and so our movements are not our own but the movements we see when we are David watching us. We place items in a red basket on our arm and evaluate our choices through David’s eyes, through the eyes of money, through the eyes of the man David is when he is just himself, so that we cannot even remember the things we think about the choices we make. Cannot believe in our own mind, our mind so much the many points of David’s view.

  God is watching you, they said; and at night, when our legs ached, we cried for forgiveness for the sins God had watched all day, a voyeur. For touching ourself, for unkind thoughts, for boredom. It is easy to trust in the all-seeing power of those we worship. And when we touch ourself now, we do not pray for forgiveness; we pray that David is watching.

  How does one throw off this persistent gaze? To live without needing a god is the
original sin, the one that saved Eve from servitude. If only philosophically.

  When we learn of Lara’s imminent return, we agree to go to the beach with David. That a trip will be nice. That the weather is perfect for it, that the weather will soon change.

  We sit quietly in his car for the first time since the first time, sliding over roads into parts of our city unseen for years. The road leads by a park of thick grass and strange sculptures where we were sent as a distraction from our own sudden arrival. The park, a diversion, now sprawls, spray-painted and bald. The road takes us past the church the grandparents drove to each week and we sat still and lifeless in itchy tights wondering when it would all be over and being reassured week after week—any day now. He will come any day.

  We increase speed to enter the Shoreway to skip to the beaches of other towns and he doesn’t say, Where I won’t be recognized with a woman not my wife, he says, I’ve always been curious about—(another town falling into the cloudy water of the lake).

  I’ve never been, either, we say, like it isn’t a kind of goodbye.

  Lara still far away, in our mind her mother taking a turn for the worse so that she must stay, we wade through hot mounds of sand, and it puffs like clouds between our toes. Our heels sink into the waves of burning powder and scratch against the cracked shells of pistachio-shaped clams; the sun rubs the bare skin of our back, calves, shoulders, and by the hand David leads us to the water’s edge. We stop where brown water pulls up onto sand and flattens it into a cool, hard stoop from which to watch David as he runs childlike into the startling strength of tiny waves. He is laughing at the shock of the cold and the blue extends out from him in all directions. It is endless and terrifying, and when he calls to us and waves his arms, we smile from the water’s edge, waving apathetically from the cool, hard sand.