by Martha Ronk
I adore it, the gallery owner said, coming from the back room, expansive and high.
Marybeth was glad she’d gone blank for a moment and glad Tom’s work sold but not in this sort of blow-out way. She looked at the gallery owner’s French wife and wondered if that was why she didn’t seem to mind—pretty enough but no knockout and still she carried it off no matter what he did. Tom was good at what he did and people were always after him, his jeans tight on his thin frame. She wished it reminded her of how fake the world was, but it didn’t. Her stomach ached. Rubbing her cheek on the faded cloth as she extended her legs on the couch when they watched TV, she saw the warm color of bits of cloth she’d kept in a box in the closet when she was nine.
Once in a therapy group she said to a man who had a wife, three children, and affairs in his head: Thinking is the same as doing it. They said she had to learn to express her anger. She hated his descriptions of free-floating limbs in net stockings over the head of his wife underneath him on the bed, so she recited lessons about the gravity of mortal sin from Catholic school and then felt guilty for having lied, for not saying the man’s loose flesh made her ill and that she’d never been a Catholic.
A dark-haired woman was talking to Tom who was twisting his cuff the way he did. Marybeth had thought the affair was over. A man in a narrow suit interrupted her with a drink. His bluish skin was shiny and he was good at talking and slicking back his slicked back hair. Next to him Marybeth felt mute, but her eyes lit up anyhow on cue as he began on the soul-force of Das Lied von der Erde. She tried not to watch Tom and Carol as their sentences twinned one another, broke off, and reattached. She tried hard to attend, although she felt herself drowning in the man’s enthusiasm and he was in any case speaking to some audience somewhere she was a mere stand-in for. She tried to remember the last classical music she had heard. He said something she missed. She shut her eyes and saw a watercolor of a dark-haired woman turning into a hare. Across the room she recognized a painter she knew who was staggering and who wouldn’t come with them later but would go back to his room, liquor his particular form of discipline.
Her own life was tidy enough. She hunted plastic from the 50’s, Bakelite spoons, green glass plates. She could see teacups and saucers on the sill above the sink. The last book she’d done had been turned, flyleaf out, the speckle across the outside, admired, a talk at a local college, a mild sort of fame. She wished she were sitting down when she saw Tom’s wrists fold.
Too brightly she came up to where Tom was standing. Carol’s coming with us, he said, putting an arm around her shoulder in a gesture that might have been reassuring. We might do an installation together. Want any more? Marybeth shook her head. Carol said yes and Tom left them standing together.
Oh, it’s nothing, Carol said to someone passing by, turning her head to sweep the room and fixing the corner where Tom stood with empty glasses and a man in a ponytail whose arms filled what space there was. Carol smiled as the owner slid by to set her glass earring swinging and to say something about her last video. I want to show you something, he said and slid some more, pulling her with him towards the back room pulling his tweed jacket off in the heat, leaving Marybeth standing alone.
Marybeth knew she was pretty enough but at the moment it didn’t help. The cupboards she had painted appeared somewhere. A woman in white bumped her out of it and she wondered if it was being older. She kept losing her sense of how funny it was in spite of losing weight.
At the restaurant she ordered a dish from the vegetable column that wouldn’t stay with her too long. She wouldn’t have chosen to come here but this year Korean was in again. Others ordered portions of raw meat with garlic, transparent noodles, a stir-fried squid, potstickers, a whole barbecued fish. Everyone wanted something. A women told a story about a screenwriter who had churned out a screenplay for a joke and made pots of money. Did you like the work, someone tried again. They looked around to see if the artist had arrived. A friend of Tom’s Marybeth couldn’t remember drank in the corner. He looked out of an old movie, perhaps on purpose. She thought about the purposeful and love and then tried not to.
The waiters set dishes down in front of each person who flipped aside purses, hair, scarves, jackets, in order to get at the food and reordered beer and pushed chairs to sit by the right person in the confusion of who had ordered what. Carol began a story about her last show and everyone’s eyes turned on her. She could get anyone to do anything and anyone to listen. You just had to watch her mouth form words. Marybeth tried to see the color of the end piece she wanted to use on the book she was designing. She brushed her hand as if by accident on Tom’s jeans as he moved to help with bottles of beer and remembered something. She tried to pull it into herself and gather herself as if it were not elsewhere but here. The food was pungent and loud, chopped and steaming. Marybeth looked down at what was set in front of her and into the gaping mouth of a toothy fish.
I think that’s mine, Carol laughed, reaching. Marybeth felt her voice tuning itself high and darty. She remembered something else and her father. No, she said, putting a large piece of garlic and fish in her mouth and biting down hard. She knew her stomach would hurt but not until tomorrow.
Blue/Green
Nature is on the inside, says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.
—Merleau-Ponty
For a long time her favorite color was blue. It simply was her favorite color, and she couldn’t stand orange—the color of cheap lipstick and being kissed when you didn’t want to be, hard and wet. A book of lies in a grease stick. But blue was the color of skies you could lie under and watch the clouds overhead and the color of violets underfoot when you walked in the woods or by the side of the river or in bouquets handed out by the poor little match girl to some gentleman who passed by in tails wearing his heart on his sleeve on late night TV.
So she concocted a theory about why people collect things of a certain color, why they gather them up in piles, why the woman with obvious skill at needlepoint also has a house filled with blue glass objects, so many there is no way to grasp whether or not they are beautiful individually or even as a group, since there are so many of them that it’s the magnitude you note, not even the blue particularly except they are, of course, all blue. You collect things, then, she supposed, because they evoke a whole side of yourself that opens and opens inside and out, or perhaps because the sheen or the shape sets off something you can’t get enough of, like that warm shoulder you are leaning against. Or it’s a Cézanne. I love you, you say.
Psychological theories about sexual magnetism are all wet, she was sure of it, they don’t take the color of things into account. This one razors his hair and overdyes it blond; his much older friend who longs for him does the same. It’s color theory that’s essential and will finally allow us to make sense of why someone sticks around. Some aesthetic faculty kicks in and one is transfixed, so the philosopher says. Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
So there she was, marching about and theorizing randomly, in that oblivious way of youth, and liking blue and buying blue shirts, blue jeans, blue silk scarves. She was walking in the blue twilight, singing a version of Blue Moon. It defined and contained her and she thought that this sort of thing would go on forever, or if not forever, at least until she was much older. Then she’d see. But then, one day she realized that blue was the color of adolescence, it was watching television all afternoon and waiting for the phone to ring or poking at your skin in a pretense of martyrdom.
And it was green in fact that took her, penetrated, amazed. She looked in a mirror, not, of course, being acutely self-conscious, that she hadn’t spent hours looking at herself, her eyebrows, the slope of her brow, but that she saw, suddenly, something different: herself in some form she hadn’t seen befo
re. Her own optic system shifted and she couldn’t see blue anymore and preferred green instead, a sort of muddy gray-green, the color of celadon pottery, the color of certain mosses in a tangle of dark branches, a color that drew you to it and made you want to stand next to it the way certain people make you want to match shoulders with them just to feel the warm side of a certain arm.
The certain arm turned out to belong to Marnie. She wanted to go where Marnie was and she wanted to be Marnie. There was no particular reason why this was the woman she wanted to be. It just was. One might explain it and one might explain it in several ways. She was blond. She had that name. And she seemed to possess a blithe insouciance, whatever that was, and to walk about like a boy, guileless and effortlessly physical as often boys can be. That’s it, she thought. She wanted to lope. She wanted greenish shirts and a dog. She wanted to write about the vastness of the mountain air.
One day in the middle of summer she went to where Marnie was vacationing in the country and simply wouldn’t go away. She’d invited herself against all protests and had gotten in the car and arrived. Marnie found it odd, this person who appeared out of nowhere wouldn’t leave and kept staring at her as if she were being, not desired exactly, but examined so that the imitation would be as correct as possible. Marnie thought: perhaps she’s attracted to me, perhaps that’s it. But she seemed just to want to copy like a schoolgirl, like girls she once knew who dressed alike and had to have the same book covers or running shoes.
On that afternoon, despite the oddity of it, they went for a walk with the dog, fed the chickens, and returned to the cabin to eat the various cheeses she had brought for the occasion, a small bribe for coming uninvited Marnie supposed, and they sat around and got a little drunk, not too drunk, but drunk enough in the perfect way of certain women, and ate small amounts of goat cheese on very thin crackers. They talked about things that mattered to them both in a sort of hum, as if talk were not exchange, but a matching of tones and tonal shifts. They talked of quality, color, light, and what each had thought about the ways the light fell on the rooftops, the platters of fruit, the painting, La Route Tournante en Sous-Bois. They puckered their mouths over the slightly sour cheese.
Of course, as you have no doubt realized by now, if someone wants to be another, the other often also wants to be her. At the museum you stand in front of the painting of Les Baigneurs and you shift into the pose in front of you, tilt this way or that. There is no rational explanation, and no reason why one likes green now but blue before, no reason why it is wonderful one day to drive so fast on the freeway you can only think of speeding faster and faster onto new and more precipitous bridges, crossing over the expanses of asphalt as fast as the car will go, and then you don’t want that at all. Why would anyone go faster than the speed limit? Why would anyone break any rule of the road? Why would anyone wear anything other than a uniform, if not one prescribed by the nuns or military officers, then one of one’s own choosing: only Nehru collars, perfectly out of date since they are still worn without irony by serious young men too thin for their own good, only bowling shirts, only jackets one size too large, only one-piece bathing suits. Why would one put one’s hand on that particular object and sense a settling as if the winds had finally given up.
Once when she was a girl she wanted to be a girl named Grace because her name was Grace, and she knew it would alter her entire way of looking at the world. In the photograph she keeps with the others on her bureau, Grace stands at the side of a lake at a camp they went to one summer, her head tilted to the side, her ponytail hanging into the sunlight that fractures her ponytail, her face, and an incandescent smile.
You wish you could unlock the muscles across the top of your shoulders and you think, if only I were someone else, they wouldn’t have locked in the first place. She couldn’t help it most of the time, she simply found herself, often embarrassingly, copying the gestures of another, imitating the tone of someone’s voice, responding to the clerk with an accent in a similar accent, using a certain word or phrase which clearly belonged to someone else. In response to a question, her mouth formed an echo, an echo that seemed oddly beautiful as if to lose a “t” made the word smooth as rocks worn by water. She hoped no one would notice, and certainly Marnie wouldn’t since it was her idea, she thought, it was she who had introduced this idea into the conversation, at least she thought it was. During the entire afternoon, they drew on one another constantly, walking slowly down the path, side by side, shoulder by shoulder. She quoted a poem as if to explain, The mind, that ocean where each kind/ Does straight its own resemblance find;/ Yet it creates, transcending these,/ Far other worlds and other seas,/ Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade.
Both changed clothes, then exchanged clothes, though it hardly mattered by then since they were both wearing castoffs from the trunk in the cabin someone else had left behind. It rained, their other clothes were wet, so they reasoned, and the clothes belonged to both and to no one. This is the thing about explanations, there are always some lying about.
When Marnie woke in the morning she wondered if her small gifts had been diminished or if she were just a bit hung-over from wine in the afternoon. She, for her part, thought her hair a bit paler, though she knew this was a ridiculous notion. No one’s hair turns overnight.
What does one afternoon count for after all. Yet the one afternoon left them all they could think of. She looked out at the sky and saw that in the gathering storm it had turned a color tilting towards green. It stood out from all other afternoons in its awkwardness and tears. At one point, each looked at the other, squirmed and blinked, and looked away. They stood shoulder to shoulder, one a bit higher than the other. They measured the height of the wall and then themselves as if it mattered and it made them think of something funny, though neither laughed, simply shifted their legs beneath them at the oddity, at scrutiny, at loss and gain. She knew all this, of course. Yet she knew that her manner of speaking had changed and that there was nothing she could do about it. She knew without a doubt that she had never used the word happiness before in her life. She’d always felt it beneath her, something for others rather more superficial and glib than she. Yet what was that odd olive green—she turned towards the window to take it in again—but happenstance expanded across the entire sky. She had been so infused with the new color, she thought, that one thing might lead to another.
Their Calendar
It was when my parents decided they could live with the blue plastic furniture left behind in the house they bought, I knew something was wrong. You don’t just go from antiques to unquestioned acceptance of the inevitable like that. I said so too. Over the years they’d picked things up here and there that belonged to them and to my childhood. On a drive into Vermont they’d snagged a leather bellows for the fireplace and bought a contraption no one could figure out what it was and lined it with copper and used it for liquor bottles so people standing around could wonder what it was or when were they ever in that neck of the woods.
After retirement, they decided to move to Florida for some reason I could never fathom. What are you thinking, I said, aghast at the whole idea. Why are you going, I’d say, and why Florida of all places. I tried to say it was hard to make friends at their age and how they should stay close by just in case and how finding doctors in new places wasn’t easy, but they didn’t seem to hear. It was like talking to the wall. They began making arrangements, not impetuously—they never did anything like that—but arrangements nevertheless, as if in slow motion. I’d stop by after work but they never seemed to need anything. A box tied and sealed stood by the front door. After a while there was another. The house grew emptier and my voice echoed. I thought things had been sent ahead but when I arrived later to help there was almost nothing to unpack and the house still clung to stray remnants from the former occupants.
Everything was ugly: the light blue wake of a shag rug, the plastic chairs, the cartoon pelican that smirked from its frame in th
e bathroom, the dusty wreath made of pale pink shells. And these few awful things were overwhelming because, as I said, when we came to unpack it turned out they’d brought almost nothing of their own. They said for me not to come but I was duty bound it seemed to me and how could I let them to do it alone and so I flew down the first chance I could get. But there was almost nothing to do. I remembered a house I grew up in, heavy, dark furniture filling every room, and at Christmas endless balls and lights for the Christmas tree, but this time they decided to “travel light” they said and had sold off what they’d collected and left behind not only holidays but almost everything I remembered. Even the dresser that had been a dentist’s cabinet was still in Connecticut and I had to give up what I thought would be my lifelong curiosity about how many times a sock had to be folded before it would fit in the narrow drawer.
They brought one photo of each relative and gave away all the rest. I had the awful thought of myself lying around in a dusty junk store box for years, and then found by a stranger who wanted to see what we looked like back then in those funny clothes. And they picked out the worst of the lot. His sister wore the dotted dress no one had ever liked. The one of me is especially bad. I am twelve, need braces, and have a raw nose from a bad cold. I haven’t yet grown into my size. At forty, I’m still a big girl but all the flesh comes to sit better as the years pass and I know how to dress and well, I still look good for my age. The salesgirls all say I can wear the sorts of dresses I’ve always worn.
I thought they’d get more stuff fairly soon, things to match the casual retirement I imagined for them, but they didn’t. All they did was rip out the lawn, circle the house in gravel and get two stray lawn chairs to face the ocean. They sat there as if waiting for something.
