Glass Grapes

by Martha Ronk

  The center of truth seemed the most perplexing and painful of all. Moreover and in truth, she and her husband had become completely out of touch and exhausted. He spent all his time writing his book and she spent all her time working on her new spiritual life and when she wasn’t working on her spiritual life and taking up new forms, Ashtanga and Flow, she was drawing members of her yoga class. She had given up attention to the things at home—they seemed somehow ghostly, illusory, from some period in her life she couldn’t remember—and she became fixated on making a poster of very small figures in all the poses she had been learning.

  She wasn’t at all sure how to get the feet right, and besides they were so often in places no one’s feet were meant to be, and though she hated to admit it, she began to long for Julie Andrews on the hillside. She crumpled paper after paper. She was tired. Late at night they passed on the way to the bedroom, completely devoted to the experiences they were having, but worn and somewhat lonely.

  #4 The most important implication of dependent origination, therefore, is that no entity exists independent of other entities.

  One morning as she was working with her pencils during yoga class, she realized that she didn’t recognize anyone. Her neighbors whom she had known slightly before beginning the class and whom by now she knew far better, seemed like strangers to her. Perhaps, she thought, it was that they assumed such twisted postures, were upside down and backwards, turned into dogs, trees, camels, and ploughs. When she got home, she showered, hoping to wash away the queasy feeling of dislocation, and dried her hair before the mirror, but she found she too had taken on a look she couldn’t quite recognize, a look not animal or vegetable, but partial.

  When her husband returned late that night, his limp still keeping him to a bit of a slow pace and the use of a cane, she looked at him hard. He too looked partial, partly she supposed because she hadn’t seen much of him of late or hadn’t looked at him carefully for some time, but partly because he looked smudged as if she had run her thumb across one of the lines of her drawings.

  For the first time in months she decided to run a few sentences by him to see how it would go. How are you, she asked, how’s your work going, what would you like for dinner tomorrow, did you notice the moon on the way home, what do you think we should do for our anniversary, does your foot hurt much, would you mind fixing the screen door, how’s Stan? Since it had been a while, she simply spun out an entire list, thinking to catch up as it were. He looked startled, but replied, fine, ok, spinach, yes, go to a movie, yes, I’m afraid so, I’ll get to it tomorrow, and not bad, I think.

  It reminded her of the church services of her youth—call and response. When they finally got over the odd shape of this exchange, they both felt better and settled in their skin. It seemed they’d gotten somewhere both familiar and different. That night they hooked into one another in the bed as they hadn’t done for weeks and slept better than they had for days. For their anniversary, they went to a movie and out to dinner at a nice local restaurant and had the usual.

  Page 42

  I know I’ve read the beginning before, maybe last summer. I picked up the book and read some few pages. Now, however, that I’m about a third into it the story still seems familiar to me and I’m wondering if indeed I read exactly this far, or if the unfolding of the story was so obvious that even though I didn’t actually get this far before, I could predict that I would recognize the new characters who’ve been introduced and that I would be as uninterested in continuing to read as I was last summer.

  Of course this makes one think about why one wants to read in so beautiful a spot anyhow where there are any number of other things to do: swim, walk, stare at birds. Today I tried staring at the birds, but after a while, no matter that I was also sunning myself, doing two things at once that is, not just one, I found myself wanting to read. The birds were interesting and even predatory, but I couldn’t get into it. So I reread the article in the newspaper about the guinea hens which people are keeping on their lawns to eat the ticks that cause lime disease and which people are very glad to have even though the birds make a sound like fingernails on a blackboard and even though their lawns are now full of holes where the guineas have gone after ticks. They are good at it and some feel, so the article says, finally safe though they check their children all over just to make perfectly sure. The whole thing seems rather tedious and the article was endless so I didn’t finish it and when I looked up the birds had gone.

  So I return to the novel I might have read before and am especially attracted to the dampness of it, the boys lying about in damp bedclothes, the dampness of the city on canals, and the damp eroticism of the novel because it so matches my own situation here in the cabin in which I am damper than ever before and also the towels and dishcloths; and the floor even seems damp under my bare feet because it is summer and I am always walking in bare feet in summer, often with a book under my arm. And the pages of the book turn and curl in the downpours and residual damp. Water drips off the leaves in the woods where the cabin is located. I sit and watch the covers of the paperbacks curl. At night or when I have left the room and then return, I find the cover curled, unless I’ve remembered to weight it down with other books, preferably hardback books which the current novel is not nor is it hardcore, though as I said, decidedly damp and erotic and so plotless as to seem familiar, as if one read about the boat ride in the canals previously, although now I am sure that last summer I didn’t get this far and that the covers were more or less flat.

  And of course I feel guilty because I ought to be doing something other than reading, but I can’t seem to stop reading except of course when I stop reading to do something equally useless like throw out bread crumbs for the birds and see what comes or fall asleep and into such a deep sleep I am with the boys in the novel throwing off bedclothes in the damp heat and throwing my legs about and scratching the scabs I have gotten from insect bites because of the holes in the screens. At night the moths come in and distract me from reading and sleeping which are the only things I do well except I have begun a list of the different sorts of moths even the ones which have died by morning and look like dried-up brown leaves. So far my favorite is the copperglaze moth, metallic and quite small, about the size of a thumbnail, and it also has the advantage of not flying about much so that in the midst of an unread paragraph one can look steadily and not have it bang into the light which one must have on if one is to get any reading done.

  So I return to the book I remember so vividly and yet vaguely and a central narrator with whom I cannot identify in the essentially plotless story and find myself thinking how much his experiences and mine are alike as he tries to pursue his tasks in the midst of increasing dread. It is the dread that does it, the summer dread that is absolutely the worst since it’s based on so little information about the sorts of ticks and spiders and moths which surround one and are so simultaneously invisible as one is going blithely about one’s business of reading the books one has to read in the course of a summer vacation.

  What the narrator seems to dread, I think, is some dissolution into the books he is reading which he feels are encroaching on what used to be his firm sense of identity; he was writing something or doing research on something, but in the midst of all this quiet ordinary endeavor he finds himself feeling a sense of dread from the dangers of the city in which he lives and from an array of unusual circumstances which seem not exactly unusual in any bizarre or outlandish sort of way but just slightly unexpected. And of course I can’t really identify with this urban dread since I’m in the woods and have no fear of helicopters flying overhead and shining searchlights into my window, but nonetheless as I read further in the book, I find myself unable to lie about dazedly as I was wont to do. Rather I find myself unnerved, fearing the unnameable something that has leaked into my cabin from this book which I make such poor progress in reading.

  Each night as I pick it up before going to bed I find myself having to reread what I had read the
night before in order to remind myself of the events which remain, despite the mood of dread, unmemorable, and by the time I have finished reading the portion from the night before I find myself unable to proceed much further, often only a sentence or two, before I drop off to sleep, a sleep which was once untroubled, but which since the taking up of this project of reading the unfinished novel from the previous summer, has been restless, troubled even, I should say. I think sometimes that I ought to get rid of this novel, bury it in the woods perhaps or find a local library and put it in the overnight return slot where someone efficient would in the morning figure out what to do with it. But then I reason with myself that this is an absurd way to behave over a novel, especially one I haven’t finished and which might, if I persevere, have a quite rounded and comforting ending, one which would repay all my efforts from last summer and this.

  Another possibility would be to take up reading a history of the city in which the central character is located so that in spite of the failure of this particular book I would have nonetheless propelled myself forward. But for some reason this also never happens and again it is evening and I have turned on the lamp and I pick up the novel and open its damp and mildewed pages, pages giving off that vaporish smell of old cabins and foxing. And again the copper moth comes and lands on the top end of the book and again I am filled with the dread of something about to occur, something looming in the distance which I will be unable to fend off, something too vague to get a firm picture of so that I am unable to conceive a plan of attack.

  In the morning I wake with the light still on, the book fallen as usual to my chest, and the moth dead and stuck to page 42, the page I have reread any number of times during the course of this particular week. And nothing has yet happened really to the narrator, nothing has moved him forward, and he hasn’t yet figured anything out. No, he is still doing research and reading in the hopes that one day he will see all things clear, will be able to fall into a damp bed and arise transformed, but as yet he is unable to move beyond p. 42, dependent as he is on my abilities which are for the moment lost, no longer exactly in a swamp of dread, but in the limp sluggishness of being unable to turn to p. 43 on which page it might be that something would finally happen or that he would finally move beyond the reading stage to something else which he can’t quite conceptualize, caught as he is in another’s inability to finish the novel which seems vaguely familiar as if I have read it all before.

  Notes

  The quotations from Joseph Cornell in the epigraph for the book and in “Like Visiting Joseph Cornell” are from Joseph Cornell: Theater of the Mind, Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, a book about things, obsessions, monologues, and dreams.

  “The Watch”: The quotation is from Ezra Pound’s “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.”

  “The Teabowl”: In Vermont near Whitingham there is a 25-acre floating island on Sadawaga Pond.

  “Old Nylon Bathrobes”: Jim Dine’s Bathrobe series provides illustrations of bathrobes that suggested to me the complex artificiality of seemingly simple renditions.

  “The Tattoo”: William Coe’s Tikal: A Handbook of the Ancient Maya Ruins provides detailed graphic designs of carved monuments, similar to the tattoos imagined in this story. I chose the designs of Mayan ruins because I had read Mayan Letters by Charles Olson.

  “Glass Grapes”: The poem referred to is “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara.

  ”His Subject/Her Subject”: I quote Wittgenstein on “trying” because his work so pointedly raises the question of how complex the seemingly ordinary can be, and because trying seems so frequently to fail in the face of things one can’t understand.

  “My Son and the Bicycle Wheel”: In “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’” Duchamp refers to his selection of various found objects; I quote him because of his reference to his own construction using a bicycle wheel and because for him also objects were tropic, insistent, indifferent to human beings. This story is for Jacob.

  “The Ring”: The portrait of Madame Gautreau is by John Singer Sargent; his paintings show up in my work often. The “gleam” mentioned in “The Flea Market” was also taken from one of his paintings, The Bead Stringers, at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  “La Belle Dame”: The poem is by Keats; the quotation is one by Roland Barthes from S/Z that I came across while reading Marianne DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism”; I use it to capture some of the sense of the bald man’s thoughts as imagined by the narrator.

  In “Blue/Green” I finally quote from Merleau-Ponty, here his essay on “Cézanne’s Doubt,” but throughout I have been influenced by his essays on the interdependency of the subjective and the objective. The poem is “The Garden” by Andrew Marvell.

  Several of the stories in Part 3 refer to photographs or essays about them; the idea of the camera giving “a posthumous shock” is from “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” by Walter Benjamin; the reference to Dauthendey and his wife is from his “A Short History of Photography.” My story “The Photograph” begins with a quotation from André Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.”

  “Soft Conversation” begins with a quotation from Cave Temples of Mogao: Art and History on the Silk Road, edited by Roderick Whitfield, Susan Whitfield, Neville Agnew, a book describing a place I can only wish I had traveled to.

  “Listening In” contains references or warped references to essays on Buddhism by Professor Dale Wright, to whom I dedicate the story.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the editors of the publications in which the following stories first appeared:

  American Letters and Commentary: “The Lightbulb”;

  The Chicago Review: “Cones”;

  The Denver Quarterly: “Glass Grapes,” “The Photograph”;

  Double Room: “Her Subject/His Subject”;

  Fence: “Marybeth and the Fish”;

  Hambone: “Tattoo”;

  The Harvard Review: “Page 42,” reprinted in PP/FF: An Anthology;

  Pleiades: “The Gift”;

  Tantalum: “My Son and the Bicycle Wheel.”

  For editorial assistance and encouragement, I want to thank those who helped with specific stories: Thaisa Frank, Laurie Lew, Michelle Huneven, Dennis Phillips, and Dyanne Asimow. For unflagging belief in this project and help both textual and otherwise, I especially thank Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck. There are many (more than I could list) whose rooms and objects have found their way into these stories: thank you all very much. The suggestiveness of the world comes in many forms; special gratitude to Dale Wright and to my family.

  About The Author

  Martha Ronk is the author of a number of books of poetry, most recently, In a landscape of having to repeat (Omnidawn), winner of the PEN USA best poetry book 2005, and Vertigo (Coffee House Press), a 2007 National Poetry Series selection. She is the recipient of a 2007 NEA grant and has had residencies at both the MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. As a Professor of Renaissance literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles, she has written academic articles on Shakespeare, specifically on ekphrasis, an extended verbal description of a visual object.

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  Glass Grapes and Other Stories

  Martha Ronk

  Colophon

  Glass Grapes and Other Stories, by Martha Ronk, is set in ITC Veljovic, a digital font designed by Jovica Veljovic (1954– ), which displays a crisp precision, as if the letters were cut in stone rather than drawn with pen and ink.

  The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by the special support of the following individuals:

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