Glass Grapes

by Martha Ronk

  Madame Gautreau, the elegant woman in the painting impressed itself on her, literally on her she would have said, and she kept the book open on the stand next to her bed. Even when she thought she’d had enough, she found herself sitting and staring. She looked at the woman. Identified only as Madame X to hide her true identity, she was, nevertheless, someone willing to give over to public display, her ear a purplish pink, the hair swept up, her head turned as if forced over her bare shoulder, gorgeous, haughty, atrocious. It made her skin itch and flake, that white powder as if spilling all over her, but for the purple ear beneath her upswept hair, even then people couldn’t stay away, stared at her portrait helplessly.

  They said she shouldn’t wear the ring with anything but black, a long black dress they imagined she would be a figure of sorts, but she never wore dresses, couldn’t grasp the exposure of them. She was wrong, wrong not only in the act itself, walking into the jewelry store and putting her gift in with the other discarded things, sad for the specters of other lives and other times, but also in the forgetting, as if, as she had so often done, she simply couldn’t look at what she had done in a past that seemed sketchily put together, remembered only in blurry bits, the walking into the store, the laying out of the pale stone on the counter, the woman wearing a matching two-piece outfit of rose flowers, shoes coordinated in beige and a large ornate crucifix around her neck. It hung there, that dead man on the silver cross. The woman looked into her eyes and smiled, of course, dear, and took it and set it in with the other jewels of past lives under the glass topped case like a public viewing before a funeral.

  Whenever he got up from the bed and brushed the side of her face with a hand before he went to the shower, she thought of the portrait as helplessly as she lifted her own hand. His arms were white as ice and though she knew they were hers at the moment she knew she couldn’t have them, couldn’t keep them, wouldn’t, perhaps, want them. They had gone now into the shower, and she remembered them only by recalling the portrait at the end of the hall, her white arms hanging at the sides of her black dress, her jewels, her regal neck. She held the piece of plastic in her hand. After a few minutes she remembered it was used to open the door.

  But she couldn’t remember the year or why she had decided to sell it, why she would get rid of something so beautiful and what she needed the money for, although she often thought she needed money. What had been, she wondered, important enough and she couldn’t remember although she thought perhaps it was when she was trying to make a life with someone. Wasn’t she always trying to make a life with someone. Who was it she wondered as she turned in the sheets. The pit of her stomach hurt and her mind refused to come up with the face of anyone but the woman in the elegant shop, yes dear, she said, as if jewels were dead things without histories or the arthritic hands moving over the sheets, enlarging all her rings, her too many rings, and holding her too tight whenever she came to visit, arriving in the ugly car she always drove. Of course it was wrong, the whole idea of her coming was wrong, how was she to stand it, this woman with the perfume that came at you even days later from a towel left hanging, from an unexpected drawer. Too many rings, too many bracelets, the blue on her eyelids lifting off and floating like a butterfly, and she knew herself queasy, saw it go back to its place on her mother’s face.

  In the motel she had met him for another late afternoon when he could get free. His face was turned away from her once they were done and she couldn’t see it and for one awful moment she couldn’t remember which face would turn around when he got up for the shower and before it was her turn and the blur of one face superimposed on another frightened her and gave her an exhilaration far beyond the sex which was, she thought, an excuse for something else anyhow. This time she hit herself before he had left the room and they never came back to that room or any other as it turned out, although neither of them talked to the other or called or tried to sort it out, and she contented herself with returning to the mockery of the motel’s name and the scandal of the farmer’s daughter, pregnant and abandoned in a small Midwestern town she had to leave, carrying her cardboard suitcase to the train station under her arm like Kim Novak. The sting left a reddish mark on the right side.

  She felt tired and faint and lost in the details of what she could remember and the wash of what she couldn’t, and somehow nothing could pull her out of this feeling or keep her now from sleep and almost sleep and the irritation of coffee she tried to drink and couldn’t and the overwhelming colors that engulfed her. Could she have acted so, like a slap in the face to the men she depended on, to whom she must have wanted to return, the table set, the candles lit, the silver gleaming. She thought if she stayed here looking at the portrait, there’d be no more memories, only the perfection of Mme Gautreau holding herself erect and aloof no matter who stared at her, came to gawk.

  The red of the floppy roses on the woman’s suit hurt her eyes and she smelled the color of white as if talc had invaded the room, her nose, her eyes itched with the perfume chalk of it. The sound of the soprano’s voice was high-pitched and grating. Red and green clicked on and off. Here she was as she thought she’d always been, bloated and tired and outlandish, the object of ridicule and shame. She kept thinking of the little plastic card that lit up the green light in the motel room. A little jewel of light. It was something she didn’t want to see now and she didn’t want to see ever again.

  Part 2

  La Belle Dame

  He sat at the edge of things trimming words out of paragraphs in his mind. His wife on the other hand laid a table for six with purple candles and lit them and straightened them and stood back to look at them and straightened them again. He paid no attention to the candles or anything else. She glared at him without animosity. He trimmed off “releasing the double meaning on principle.” I watched. I wanted to put my hands on the top of his bald head the way I always do. Why is it that men fear going bald, when it is exactly this trait which makes them erotic, so available and irresistibly blank. One can’t touch men in any way really—they have such good defenses—but when they are bald, it is as if one had a head on a platter without the fuss of dancing or veils.

  When the other guests arrived we sat down for conversation and wine and we all started in, I with some usual enthusiasm, this time a fixation on a poem I’d just read, the others about a conference on semiotics. Somewhere in the city, papers were still being read, speeches given. He tried to join in, but his paragraph, the one he had been working on, held him tight in her arms; you could almost see him struggle to get loose, but it was of no avail. One loopy sentence drifted like tendrils around him. The rhapsody of thought held him in thrall, La Belle Dame etc., and no matter that he made himself look straight at us, he couldn’t see us, and we remained that lumpy and indistinguishable blur called “dinner guests.”

  O what can ail thee, knight at arms

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has wither’d from the Lake

  And no birds sing.

  One can’t help being sympathetic with one so lost in his own thoughts, removed, so unable to join in. I tried to throw looks of sympathy his way as I thumbed through photographs of the family and family dog being passed around. One can’t help one’s fondness for the specific: the sleek head of the Doberman, the missing teeth of the small boy. But for the most part, and this remained throughout the evening, I couldn’t get over the prominence of his head and the glorious abstraction of his mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant to live inside one’s head, to have vast capacities of thought, to be able to follow one’s roving ideas through potential paragraphs and pages, despite dinner guests. I think that if it had been in his control, he would have joined in and would in fact have enjoyed the company his wife had gathered together to eat pasta on shiny blue plates. She too was Italian and a great cook, everybody said so, and the guests were witty enough, charming and eager, leaning forward over their blue plates, semiotic quips, ties and beads. But as it was, he was lost
on the edges of who could ever imagine what brilliant ideas, what perfectly orchestrated arguments.

  One has to, one friend says to me, one just has to, if only from time to time, use one’s best china. The watery blue that linked us over the years of our friendship expanded and flowed around us as the evening progressed: the purple candles, the blue plates, the mood of sentimental intelligence, the fact of our having had so many dinners together over so many years. What we knew or thought we knew about each other. So the wash of the evening was as the watery wash of the brush over colors too saturated, too refined. We all blended and purred.

  After a while he couldn’t even pretend. His mouth stopped its silent opening and shutting as if he might possibly join in, his eyes stopped trying to focus, his hands began a silent dance of gestures meant, I am sure, to illustrate the points he was making in the paragraph he was writing or had written or thought to write when a break finally came and he could escape from the swaying of the crowd.

  Once as a child I took a dance class, not the usual ballet I was used to, but a special session offered on Saturday by a special guest teacher from Albany. We stood in our black leotards, all ungainly girls, all unformed and shy, and were asked to become a forest of trees, to sway to the music with our arms outspread, to bend and blend together as if our branches were being swept by incessant wind. There was no way, despite our embarrassment, not to do what we were told to do (we were obedient and trained, after all, good girls with identical topknots and feeble aspirations), swaying and bending in a way that we knew already by the age of nine was out of date and stupid. Does it mean not being stupid, this life of the mind, this fervor to stand alone, to pursue a thought to its finish, to finish a line of argument or recall a poem while everyone else is finishing dessert or clearing the table or swaying to the music. He was like a rock in the middle of the stream. We all moved around him as if he were insensate matter, as if his head were the boulder, as if he were only a sign pointing elsewhere, not to us, not to any of us. His wife poked teasingly, familiarly at his ribs at about the middle of the dinner, but finally gave up, acquiesced, and his silence became the most obvious part of the conversation, not that we stopped or faltered, intent as we were on discussing the roast beef, the rosemary potatoes, and the lemon pie—its glaze reflecting back the watery light of the candles—but that it was incorporated as part of the whole piece we were constructing, until by the end of the evening I was exhausted beyond all manner of thinking by the sheer effort of stepping around him, not including him, not hearing his voice, not expecting a response.

  I felt myself sweaty and wet with the effort of ignoring the head that was so prominent and fine. I too, I too, I wanted to say. I know what you’re like. I too am alone. I too embrace abstract thought; I too can quote Keats. I knew what he was thinking, could feel the difficulty of transition, of how to capture the range of meanings, the sinister proliferation of possible comments about one word. What was the word. I concentrated, but it slipped away: mutatis mutandis. And I wanted this head, more than anything else, I wanted to hold it and cradle it and make it my own. To me it had become a valued object, a thing to be possessed and clung to, the only thing worth having—not the thoughts themselves exactly, but their locus, the bald head towering above us as we went about exchanging dates and plans and ideas for the next party, the next grouping of dinner plates.

  I’ll do green, I promised, all green. One New Year’s we’d had an all black affair; we’d announced as if in chorus our sophisticated disdain for celebrations of the New Year, our love of the old, our hatred of joy and hats and whistles. Instead, we proposed, we’d go into mourning for the lovely past, wear black for the old year and eat only black food: blackened fish, black pasta with squid ink sauce, blackberries, wine so dark as to seem black. Black olives. I could do all green easily enough, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to plan ahead, didn’t want to discuss what salads I’d concoct, where to buy the best arugula. I wanted to watch the bald man quote and trim, add and subtract, think his weighty thoughts and recite poetry. Now he was mouthing an entirely new paragraph, a new projection, had pulled in philosophical ideas to undergird his point, and then had begun, I could see it, to quote the lines themselves:

  And there she lulled me asleep,

  And there I dream’d, Ah! woe betide!

  The latest dream I ever dreamt

  On the cold hill’s side.

  I wanted this removed being, this standoffish husband, this owl of a man. What was he doing so all alone on the shores of his thoughts, pacing up and down in the narrow room, furrowing his extensive brow. I wanted to watch him as he slept, watch the head in noble repose. We were, I wanted to tell him, exactly alike. I could read him, I knew it. We were meant for each other. He was alone; I was alone. I meandered up and down the cold hill’s side.

  In such a state, I lost, as one might have expected, my usual ability to concentrate on several things at once, keeping the one tune going while overlaying grace notes, keeping the color clear while adding water, whole brushfuls of clear water. I was no longer able to talk about next Thursday and get the word I was looking for, looking at, one might say, as my eyes just grazed the top of his head again and again, knowing the word would appear if I just brushed past it enough times, like rubbing a lead pencil over a paper laid on a tombstone and watching the knight’s shield with its hidden meanings come clear. I must have been clearing the table, trying in the ordinary course of things to maneuver just a bit closer to the thoughts I could almost hear (“our literature is thus characterized by the pitiless divorce between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader”), almost. Dear reader, I broke the platter, it slipped out of my hands on the way to the kitchen and was smashed into a million bits. I almost had hold of the word but the platter got away. Olive oil, Sharia said. It’s edges are covered in olive oil. Not to worry, she said and scrambled and mopped and collected the pieces.

  Then, as if the smashed platter had done it, broken the spell and all connection between us, the man laughed and turned to his wife in congratulations for a fine affair, for all her splendid efforts in the kitchen (he congratulated her on the perfection of the roast), and put his arms around her and laughed as if the union of one with another were as easy as anything. The pale loitering I had seen so clearly that it seemed etched on the walls of the dining room, vanished. The dog came into the room and hung, sloppy and wet, about the backs of our legs. The boy woke and stood in yellow pajamas at the top of the stairs. The spell was broken, as if one had waked cold and alone on a hill and I, embarrassed and foolish, wrapped myself in my thick winter coat, December in New York, and went home alone by taxi in the dark.

  Marybeth and the Fish

  Marybeth said vaguely, They are nice, silvery sort of, and preened by turning her head and thinking she had hair enough. She saw the words Veronica Lake as if written in loopy scroll on her inner eyelids, thought of Sullivan’s Travels, and came back feeling better from her brief reverie of someone else’s blond beauty. Puffy off-the-shoulder blouses were in again. Hers was worn a shade defensively, but in the smoky noise of the gallery opening no one would notice.

  Someone compared the work on the wall to Lissitzky but someone said no it was not so ironic, and there was an exchange about what did irony mean anyhow in these post-everything days. Marybeth had always had a suspicion that often it was meanness. From his leather chair, out of the past, her father said something she couldn’t quite hear as if the sound on the TV had been turned off. She remembered opening colored pencils in a flip-top box and she remembered laughing with her father at whatever he had said in that long-ago afternoon when afternoons seemed to grow longer and quieter as she made drawing after drawing.

  Tom thought she should talk more. He said he liked her way of getting into the visual component of cooking, the way she stared at the color of tomatoes as she stirred the spoon around and around. But sometimes he was just irked. H
er book covers were elegant and people ordered them and with the job at the café it was enough. She knew what celadon green would do and she mostly took life, except for the occasional pain in her stomach, in a dazed sort of way.

  Although she wasn’t as sure of herself as most took her to be, she delivered well in a voice high and darty, and used the pain, the small but sharp one, to make a kind of arching stance. It was what, so he said, had drawn Tom to her in the first place. He’d seen her in what he’d called a delicious mope one night, but it was the sort of mope edged off by wit. At least it seemed that way to Tom who was hooked he said. Tom’s way of putting things seemed to Marybeth as if the shade of color were slightly off. She looked away from the strident fluorescent bouncing off the gallery walls.

  I could be wrong, someone said and went for wine. If anything goes, what sort of standards . . . it’s all a realm of play. It’s true in fashion, music, I mean I know all that about the failure of institutions but isn’t this, I mean, we’re not in the nineteenth century.

  One whose hair radiated around a bored but pale face opened her mouth. Her girlfriend stuck a cigarette in and began to croon Stormy Weather. Are you singing these days? The person speaking felt embarrassed and obliged to ask and she was, at the Club A.V. She’d made it, at least as back-up, so she was stuck where she was. I just stick to oldies, she said to no one in particular and passed a hand over the radiant fluff of hair. Both of the women wore black like most in the room but had moved beyond producer-leather. They hummed.